CSS3

Hats off to the CSS Working Group, it must have been a busy few weeks. Not only have they released several updated specifications, most notably the long awaited publication of the CSS2.1 specification as an official W3C recommendation, but also introduced a major redesign of their home page.

The release of CSS2.1 as an official recommendation also paved the way for the CSS3 Color module to advance to the recommendation stage, becoming the first CSS3 specification to be released as an official W3C Recommendation.

Released on Friday 20th May 2011, Firefox 5 beta brings long awaited support for the CSS3 Animations module, released as a W3C working draft in March 2009, to Mozilla’s popular web browser.

Posting on behalf of Tab Atkins about an open spec issue:

I’ve been pretty adamant for some time that gradients should use the math-y interpretation of angles, where 0deg is East and 90deg is North. In addition to matching what you learn in school about polar coordinates, it matches what tools like Photoshop expose. Other members of the WG, though, have been equally adamant that we should more closely match existing language conventions, particularly that bigger angles mean clockwise rotation.

The strength of my conviction has eroded over time. It really is true that every other use of angles uses them to represent clockwise rotations. In SVG, angles are present in transforms and the glyph-orientation properties, while in CSS they’re present in transforms, image-orientation, and the azimuth and elevation aural properties. In all of them (save elevation, which rotates in a different axis), the rotation is clockwise.

Stunning CSS3 by Zoe Gillenwater is a project-based book offering a solid guide to what’s possible and what’s coming around the corner with CSS.

Published by PeachPit, Stunning CSS3 is set in the same easy-going, information-packed writing style that carried out in her previous book, Fluid Web Layout.

CSS3 allows web designers to specify multiple background images for box elements, using nothing more than a simple comma-separated list.

Browser support for multiple backgrounds is now relatively widespread with Mozilla Firefox (3.6+), Safari/Chrome (1.0/1.3+), Opera (10.5+) and even Internet Explorer (9.0+) all implementing the feature.

Read the updated article in our CSS3 Preview section »

The W3C CSS Working Group have introduced a new module to CSS3, the CSS3 Grid Layout module, as well as released two further updated specifications, for the CSS3 Multi-column Layout and CSS3 Text modules.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s new.

With Internet Explorer 9 barely out of the labs, Microsoft yesterday caught many developers by surprise, with the launch of the first platform preview of the latest incarnation of their popular web browser, Internet Explorer 10, at this years Mix conference.

The latest version of Internet Explorer, currently only three weeks into the development cycle, already boasts an impressive array of improvements, particularly in terms of CSS3 support, addressing many of the areas missed by IE9. For this release, Microsoft has paid particular attention to the CSS3 layout modules, with the platform preview offering implementations of the CSS3 Multi-column Layout module, the Flexible Box Layout module, and the recently announced CSS3 Grid Layout module.

The W3C CSS Working Group have released two further updated working draft specifications for CSS3.

The first, released on 11 March, sees a major overhaul of the CSS3 Flexible Box Layout module. The second, released on 24 March, brings several enhancements to the CSS3 Fonts module.

Opera have once again kicked their level of CSS3 support up a notch with the release of the latest beta version of their popular web browser. Opera version 11.10 beta, code named ‘Barracuda’, was first unveiled at this weeks SXSW in Austin, Texas, before being made available for download as a public beta yesterday.

The most notable improvements to the browser, in terms of CSS3, are support for CSS3 multi-column layout and partial support for CSS3 gradients.

Update: this offer is now available for the foreseeable future

Think Vitamin are offering free access to their entire CSS3 Video Training Course for 24 hours, until Wednesday March 16th at 11:59pm.

The series, totalling 51 videos, covers CSS3 basics such as border-radius, box-shadow and CSS3 gradients, as well as more complex subjects including CSS3 selectors, transitions, animations and transforms.