CSS3

I don’t mean to keep taking content from Opera’s Chief Web Opener, David Storey, every week, it’s just that he’s written about CSS3 a lot, recently. In his latest update on the forthcoming browser revision (codenamed Kestrel), he says that two buggy selectors have been fixed, and they are confident that when the remaining seven are ‘switched on’, they will also be fully implemented – making it the second browser to reach full compliance with the selectors test.

The latest security update of Firefox, 2.0.0.2, provides a fix for a possible spoofing attack using the CSS3 cursor property.

As far as I’m aware, this is the first known security hole which uses CSS3 properties; perhaps someone can correct me if I’m wrong.

A quick run through the visitor logs of 10 websites I run or manage shows that Internet Explorer 7 usage is still growing, although it’s slowed down considerably since the boom of December 2006 when Microsoft released it into the automatic update programme.

Average share for the month of February (to date) is 18.4%; the number varies from 9% to 26%. These figures are from a range of different sites, from personal blogs to full corporate websites, and are intended to be indicative, not definitive.

TheCounter.com puts the figure at 24%; Browser News provides a range between 14% and 25%.

I think 20% is probably a reasonable estimate; that’s one fifth of the market. It’s pretty big, but even with Firefox’s share of around 15% and Safari’s 5% or so (as well as the smaller market share of Opera and others) that means that less than 50% of the surfing public use a browser with even the most basic CSS3 functionality.

First, here’s another table showing CSS support in web browsers, including CSS3 declarations. Unfortunately the author only seems to have access to browsers that run in Windows, so it’s not as complete as it could be. Interesting, nonetheless.

Update: I stand corrected. There are options to choose which browsers display in the table, which makes it very useful.

And here’s a demonstration purportedly showing an implementation of the text-overflow: ellipsis property using CSS and Javascript (read about the property here). Perhaps I’m missing something, but it only seems to work patchily for me in Firefox and Opera; I wonder how much testing it’s had.

The W3C has updated the working draft of the CSS3 module — Generated Content for Paged Media.

We’ve been focussing a lot on what we will gain from CSS3, but of course we will lose some things too; namely, some of the CSS tricks we’ve come to rely on over the past few years.

I’m thinking about some of the great techniques that have been developed to stylise the web, like the ‘sliding doors’ technique, for example. It’s a simple and elegant way to style your navigation lists, but it will be made redundant either by border-radius or multiple backgrounds (or a combination of the two).

As you might have seen, we have moved the blog from /blog/ to the main domain, since the homepage wasn’t exactly useful anyway. In the process we have moved some pages that were static into WordPress, and we will be doing that for most other pages as well in the coming weeks. If you see glitches, feel free to mail us, we’ll try and fix it.

Mozilla released Gran Paradiso alpha 2, which is what will become Firefox 3. Running it through the CSS selectors testsuite shows there’s been a few improvements. It passed 32 out of the 43 selectors. Only 4 are buggy and 7 unsupported. That’s not a big improvement over Firefox 2.0.0.1, as that browser passes 26 of the 43, with 10 buggy and the same number of unsupported selectors. It looks like they’ve debugged issues with their attribute selectors so far, but this is only an alpha so there’s likely lots of improvements yet to come.

Sometimes it’s difficult to figure out why we might need some aspects of CSS3. Like why would anyone ever need :not()? After all, it’s like it works on elements we don’t care to style. Why would we need that?

Recently I posted about Konqueror 3.5.6 and said:

It really is a shame that only a tiny proportion of web users have access to this excellent browser.

That comment was picked up by this blogger who responded:

Virtually every web user can use Konqueror. All they would need to do is install an operating system like Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, or Mac OS X.