CSS3

Recently I began planning a brief tutorial on using the CSS3 attribute selectors (which are now implemented in all the latest major browsers) to add decoration to hyperlinks. Looks like I don’t need to now, however, as this morning I found this article: Showing Hyperlink Cues with CSS, which explains the method very well.

Some of you might have noticed that this site is not valid CSS, which is of course a tid bit weird for a site as this… There’s a reason for this though. New CSS3 features are often “tested” by browser manufacturers by implementing them as vendor specific extensions. These are allowed by both CSS2.1 and CSS3, yet, the validator does error on them, even when it’s validation profile is set to CSS3.

Last month I did an audit on some websites I manage to see what kind of take-up IE7 had; the figure varied between 1% and 12% of total visitors. Now that Microsoft have placed the new browser into the automatic download programme, I decided to go back and revisit the stats again.

The Webkit project have announced support for a new range of CSS declarations, to be used for putting strokes around text. This strikes me as a little strange for two reasons:

Thanks to my new “online friend”, (or how do you call such a thing?) Faruk Ateş, I got the chance to ask the famous webdesigner Andy Clarke some questions via email. He responded quite rapidly, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff among his answers. So check it out:

It’s taken me years to get to the level of CSS developer I am now, and I’m by no means a master. (I am able to make just about any Photoshop design into a solid webdesign though…) Because it’s taken me so long, I was a bit skeptical about the subtitle of the book I’m now reviewing: Beginning CSS Web Development: From Novice to Professional.

This site has always been about what we wanted to tell you about CSS3. We have some nice articles coming up, among which at least one interview with a famous webdesigner and I would like to know (so please drop your questions in the comments): what do you want to know about CSS3?

In my previous post I don’t think I put enough emphasis on the fact that the Advanced Layout method may never happen; it could be dropped by the W3C, never implemented by the browser makers, or replaced by a better method.

However, let’s work on the assumption that it does get implemented and take a closer look.

The difficulty many developers face when they start moving to table-less sites is getting the layout to work. Floats and positioning are easy enough for basic layouts, but start to become incredibly complex when moving to a more advanced level. When the push to move to pure CSS layouts became intense, the problem was – and is – that tables are still a lot more convenient in many cases, and there is sometimes no decent alternative without contorting yourself; you can’t even use the display: table family, as there’s no support in IE.

An interesting potential solution is in the CSS3 Advanced Layout module.

I went through the logs of some of the sites I own or manage today, to see what kind of uptake there’s been for IE7. From ten sites, some business and some personal, the percentage of users varies between 1% and 12% using IE7.