Reading up on the CSS 3 working draft
I was taking a look at the proposed CSS-3 spec the other day and found a few interesting things.
The first is multi-column (text) layout, which would allow you to do columned text like a newspaper. Many people jump to conclusions and assume that this is a way of doing page layout, which it isn't from what I can see. It does have some interesting implications for web design though, and I'm not sure that it's a good thing...
Next there is advanced layout which would allow you to lay out a web page in a grid and assign div's to different positions in the grid. So this is sort of mimicing the old way of using a table as a grid. Only now we've got a way to do it without hacking mark-up. The problem I see from what I read in there is that there doesn't seem to be a way to combine boxes (yet).
The background and borders section mentions stretch-able backgrounds and (cue god-like holy sound) rounded corners among other things. The CSS Fonts section mentions emboss and outline effects, kerning, and smoothing/anti-aliasing. Emboss and outline! Yikes (runs away screaming...). Web fonts will allow you to embed a specific font in your webpage to be used. So you could finally do text in a special font even if the user didn't have it installed! The Hyperlink Presentation bit seems to implly that there will be a way to open a link in a new window. There's also a lot of stuff to help with international text display which I won't go into here.
I haven't looked at the material on selectors yet but there looks to be some interesting additions there.
How do you think this will change teh way we do web design? Granted, it will probably be 2015 by the time Internet Explorer supports all of this but we can still imagine
demonhale posted this at 03:21 — 12th July 2006.
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I was having my hopes up and felt very excited by the post, and then I came to the bottom part and I was crushed to the ground...
Megan posted this at 12:48 — 12th July 2006.
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Well, you never know. They have said that they plan to release new versions more frequently now. Sounds like they know that the lack of updates really cost them.
Megan
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demonhale posted this at 02:55 — 13th July 2006.
He has: 3,278 posts
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Well I hope people convert sooner to the OS browsers so that CSS 3 will work upright from release. It woul really be good to use those new tags for layout, the hassle fro previous hacks would disappear...
Abhishek Reddy posted this at 03:58 — 13th July 2006.
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I'm a little more optimistic about CSS3 support from Microsoft. Once upon a time, much of CSS's innovation was implemented first -- if not only -- by IE. A few of its most demanded features were grown in-house. That is, until things stalled at IE5.
This time the draft is ahead of anything IE has come up with recently, or will in the near future. As far as I can tell, IE7 won't bring much new stuff to the table -- it's still catching up.
So I think IE's poor CSS support is a legacy due, in large part, to its former market position. Now that circumstances aren't in its favour in that regard, I suspect MS will be forced to develop closer to the W3C spec if it wants anything like the features CSS3 offers.
JeevesBond posted this at 12:02 — 13th July 2006.
He has: 3,956 posts
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Yes we may well see CSS3 support in IE, we will continue to see standards compliance until Microsoft once again has an overwhelming market share. I predict one of two things will happen at that point:
I would expect the latter, locking people into both it's browser and online services. CSS3 looks interesting, hopefully we'll see that implemented before IE's market share gets too big again.
Uh-oh!
Also web fonts are probably going to give the less experienced designer license to create designs which are completely illegible.
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