CSS3

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past six months, chances are you’ve heard of US interaction designers and strategists ZURB. Over the past few months their ZURBplayground has showcased some fantastic examples and demonstrations of the power of CSS3, alongside other web technologies, and has been covered by tens of thousands of blogs around the world.

The first public beta of the forthcoming Firefox 4 browser has been released bringing increased support for CSS3 amongst various other improvements.

One of the most notable new additions in Firefox 4 is support for CSS3 Transitions (with the -moz- prefix). Webkit based browsers (such as Safari / Chrome) and Opera have supported CSS3 Transitions for some time, almost three years in Webkit’s case, and it is reassuring to see that Mozilla have finally made an effort to catch up with the competition in this area.

The W3C have today issued a last call working draft for the CSS3 Backgrounds and Borders module.

The updated specification includes several changes from the previous Candidate Recommendation release including:

* Addition of ‘content-box’ value of ‘background-clip’.
* Change to the ‘background’ shorthand syntax for ‘background-clip’ and ‘background-origin’.
* Removal of recommendation to use gradients for color transitions when ‘border-radius’ produces a curve.
* (Re)Addition of ‘box-shadow’ property.
* Various clarifications.

You can read further detail on the changes in our previous article here.

The W3C has set a deadline of the 6th July for comments. Any comments should be submitted to the www-style mailing list, see the status section of the specification for further details.

They may have arrived late to the party, but Microsoft are keen to make their presence known, and in an effort to show just how engaged with the web standards community they are, or perhaps more a chance to try and gain one up on the competition, have published a set of results (on the 5th may) outlining not only how great IE9’s performance in a number of test cases is, but also just how badly the competition compare.

A recent editors draft of the CSS3 Background and Borders module (published on 5th may) indicates that the box-shadow property could be set to make a reappearance before the specification is released as a Proposed Recommendation.

The specification also features several other updates including the addition of a ‘content-box’ value to the background-clip property, changes to the background shorthand syntax for background-clip and background-origin, and the removal of a recommendation to use gradients for color transitions when border-radius produces a curve, further details below.

Last week also saw the release of an updated working draft of the CSS3 Template Layout module, read on for further details.

Microsoft today announced further details of their forthcoming Internet Explorer 9 browser, along with the first platform preview for developers, at their MIX Conference 2010.

Amongst the announcements comes increased support for CSS3, with support promised for CSS3 Selectors, Namespaces, Colors, Values, Backgrounds & Borders and Fonts, along with increased support for HTML5 and improvements in JavaScript performance.

The platform preview, downloadable from the Internet Explorer website, comes with a number of demonstrations including those for CSS3 border-radius and selectors. The preview also scores an impressive 578/578 on our CSS3 Selectors Test and an improved 55/100 on the Acid 3 test, with further improvements promised before the final release.

You can read more on the Internet Explorer blog, or download the platform preview here.

This week has seen the announcement of a couple of new online tools for generating cross-browser CSS3 rules, CSS3 Please! and CSS3 Generator.

CSS3 Please!, produced by Paul Irish and Jonathon Neal, aims to simplify the design process by allowing designers to enter one value, and have this instantly synced and normalised for each vendor-specific prefix, with the corresponding code generated automatically.

The tool offers support for border-radius, box-shadow, linear-gradients, rotation, rgba colors and @font-face, with work underway on support for skew and scale. In some circumstances the tool also offers support for Internet Explorer using IE filters to replicate the same effects as achieved by CSS3 properties. CSS3 Please! has been gaining a significant amount of interest around the blogosphere since its launch earlier this week.

The announcement of our redesign last month received an overwhelming number of comments, with the majority expressing negative feedback. The main concerns raised were that the new design was too dark, lifeless / boring and lacking in fun, spirit and character.

As previously stated, the main reason for the redesign was from a functional perspective to allow us to expand the site and take it forward. The reason that the old design was removed, and not simply recoded to make the functional changes required, was in fact due to a number of negative comments I had received about the previous design since taking over the site in July 2009, however following the large number of comments received over the last three weeks in support of the previous design, it is now apparent that these negative comments were not representative of the views of the majority of our readers. With this in mind I have made the decision to temporarily reinstate the old design whilst considering the best way to move forward with the site.

Benjamin Meyer has been busy creating Anigma, an online game designed to showcase some of the functionality in CSS3, particularly CSS3 Transitions and Animations.

I’m pleased today to be able to announce the completion of CSS3 .info’s redesign, bringing the site a much needed new look and feel.