CSS3

1. Hi John, thanks for agreeing to this interview! Could you introduce yourself a bit to our readers?

   Sure! I’ve been a software developer, running my own company Westciv, with my business partner Maxine Sherrin since 1993. We’ve been selling software online since 1995, which of course lead us to web design and development (my interest in hypertext goes back to the 1980s, and our first application was in fact a hypertext knowledge management system.

Slides from Jina Bolton‘s presentation at FoWD 2007, CSS3 And What Could Be [PDF, 3.2MB], are now available to download from her website Creating Sexy Stylesheets.

There won’t be a lot of revelatory information in there for regular readers of this site, or those otherwise clued up on CSS3, but there are some nice practical examples to take a look at, particularly of the Advanced Layout and Grid Positioning modules.

Rijk van Geijtenbeek wrote in to tell us that he’s created a CSS3 Quick reference in the form of a browser sidebar (direcly usable in Firefox and Opera) for quick access to all CSS 3 properties from all published modules. This, he says, is an ofshoot of Eric Meyer’s CSS 2 QR sidebar which he’s been maintaining for a few years.

His official announcement can be found here, and you can download this or his other panels from here.

It looks great, so thx a lot Rijk for putting your work into this!

The Webkit team have certainly been busy recently; since we mentioned the introduction of web fonts, they’ve also implemented transformations and animations.

Transformations, via the -webkit-transform property, allow you to scale, rotate and skew block elements; reader Ain Tohvri has put together an impressive test suite. At the moment this property doesn’t affect layout, so behaves more like a relatively positioned element.

Animation, which uses the -webkit-transition family of properties, allows you to set timings for fades, rotation, expansion, collapses, and more. They work in the same way as many current JavaScript libraries.

I’m in two minds about this; while it’s always welcome to see more innovation from browser manufacturers, I can’t help but think that they’re focussing their energies in the wrong direction. As I mentioned above, all of the above effects can be replicated with JavaScript libraries, and I don’t think that CSS should be used for controlling behaviour so explicitly. Users who don’t like to see animated pages currently have the option of disabling scripts, but they won’t have the option of disabling CSS in the same way.

Also, IMHO, there are a more pressing areas of CSS that need investigating; the Advanced Layout or Grid Layout modules are more important to the future of CSS than animations and transformations.

On the positive side, the Webkit team have promised to release technical documents which explain the proposed spec in detail.

If these new features float your boat, you can test them out by downloading the latest Webkit nightlies.

Too many people see the Web a bit like television: who ever heard of incompatible content? If there is an error, it’s because the TV set is broken, or maybe the antenna. On the Web, it is much more likely that the content is invalid, but try to explain that to users who just want to buy their holiday or see their bank account…

A very interesting interview with Bert Bos, on the history and future of CSS.

As we mentioned at the end of last month, the W3C have released a working draft of their first annual snapshot. The snapshots are intended to show which specs are stable enough to be considered part of the current state CSS.

The 2007 snapshot is:

• CSS Level 2 Revision 1
• Selectors Level 3
• CSS Namespaces
• CSS Color Level 3

The browser with the least support for the snapshot is, as you’ve probably already guessed, Internet Explorer. Opera has implemented all of the new selectors, but doesn’t yet have support for RGBA & HSL/A colours, which both the forthcoming Safari 3 (Webkit) and Firefox 3 (Gecko 1.9) have implemented. FF3 doesn’t do well with many of the new selectors, however, which Safari does.

While it would be nice to have included text effects and backgrounds & borders in this snapshot, differing browser implementations means they’re just not ready yet.

Even if this working draft becomes a recommendation shortly, no current or imminent browser fully supports the modules contained within; and with Firefox 3, Safari 3, and Opera 9.5 due for release over the next few months, it’s not impossible that none will do so until the latter half of next year. It could even be the case that IE.Next swoops in to beat the others!

With the CSS Eleven set to provide feedback to the W3C over the next few months, the 2008 snapshot could be a little more adventurous than that of 2007.

Here at css3.info we have a limited amount of resources, yet I’d like to push this site a little further then it’s already going, so I’m hoping you guys out there can help us out! What we need, are test cases for the different modules. The first that comes to mind, or actually was a request of Eric Seidel, Webkit developer: multi-column layout testcases.

Our current preview page doesn’t match the last version of the module, and browsers like Safari 3 are catching up, so we need more tests of it! If you make a testcase which we publish you will of course receive full credit for it in the footer of such a testcase.

The announcement of the formation of the CSS Eleven has caused quite a stir in the web development community, with a few questions raised over the self-appointed nature of the group and the way the announcement has been presented. One thing that everyone agrees on, however, is that there’s a clear and obvious need for their existence.

We spoke to Andy Clarke, respected designer and author, who announced the group’s formation (and explained it further here), and asked him a few questions about what we can expect from the CSS Eleven.

1. Please could you sum up very briefly for anyone who hasn’t read your introduction what the CSS Eleven is, and what you aim to do.

   One of the biggest challenges that the CSS Working Group faces is engineering solutions that meet the expectations of visual designers and developers. Leaving aside for a moment their other difficult tasks such as internationalization, understanding what designers need is a tough job; particularly as CSS gets more complex in the areas of layout, typography and other design related areas. The members of the working group, largely technical people, need help. They need practical help to understand what designers need, and in detail. This help cannot come simply from reading emails that are sent to them with suggestions. So far, the channels of communication between creative people and the CSS Working Group have been difficult and many people that I speak to feel that a new way needs to be found to get the designer’s voice heard and their needs understood.

   CSS Eleven is an informal group of visual designers and developers who have agreed to give up a little of their time to helping the CSS Working Group to understand what we need from CSS in the future. We will help by making suggestions, but more importantly by providing clear, real-world, visual, graphical examples of the results of the CSS that we need and helping with making test suites; two areas that have proven very time consuming in the past.

   Are we the only group that the Working Group will listen to? I hope not. We’re simply the first of what I hope will many ways that visual designers and developers get together to help make sure that CSS3 is what designers deserve it to be.

2. How will you arrive at the decisions as to which modules are most keenly needed?

   The decision to look at CSS Multi-Columns was purely mine as it is a mature draft with some features already available to test in some browsers. In the future I’m sure that efforts will be focussed on the modules that matter most to us as visual designers (personally, I’m particularly looking forward to seeing what happens with Advanced Layout). I’m sure that we’ll get lots of feedback and suggestions from the industry at large too.

3. Won’t it be hard to make judgements about implementation when there are no browsers available to test the more advanced features on?

   Of course implementation is important, and we would hope that the browser makers on the CSS Working Group will help us all they can by continuing to implement new features. For me as a visual designer, describing the features that I need from CSS visually is one of the most important jobs that I can do to help the development of CSS. We need clear, real-world visual examples from people who also understand CSS from an everyday working perspective. I’m sure that with so many great people volunteering, there will be plenty to work on.

4. What kind of timescale are you looking at for releasing the first batch of recommendations?

   I would think that we will two months working collaboratively on CSS Multi-Columns, after which I expect that we will open the wiki (or some similar facility) to a wider audience for a month before wrapping things up and handing it to the CSS Working group. Of course everybody involved is volunteering some of their valuable time, so time-scales may change.

5. Which aspect of CSS 3 are you personally most looking forward to?

   Grid Positioning and Advanced Layout will help to solve many of the problems that designers face every day using CSS. There has been a little confusion about the role of Grid Positioning and its relationship to Advanced Layout, but both are exciting developments that I am looking forward to seeing.

Kornel mailed me today with an addition to the text-shadow preview page, that looks quite good :). He noted that the Safari implementation of text-shadow is a bit poor, as it supports only one shadow, and they are offset wrong by 1px. Thanks Kornel!

If you have any additions or new preview pages, feel free to contact us!

The latest Webkit builds now support an open implementation of the @font-face rule, which we wrote about some time ago. Recent articles by Håkon Wium Lie had indicated that Opera might be first to market with this, but the Webkit team seem to have beaten them to it.

In short, @font-face allows you to download fonts to the visitor’s browser, meaning you can use any licensed font to display your pages. An example of use would be:

@font-face {
font-family: 'The New Font';
src: url('http://www.example.net/newfont/');
}

It’s a step forward for the web, and I’m delighted it’s here. Congratulations to the Webkit team, and here’s hoping that Opera push forward with their plans to implement it too. It seems like Firefox 3 won’t support this rule, so late 2008 may be the earliest we see this in Mozilla browsers.

As for Internet Explorer, they’ve actually implemented @font-face since version 4! However, it only works with their proprietary font format, .eot, and never took off. I wonder if they will reimplement it with Open- or True-Type fonts now.

@font-face isn’t actually new in CSS 3, it’s been around since CSS 2. However, as it’s never been properly introduced I think it’s okay to include it here!