The latest edition to the “Small designers’ book of fancy buzzwords everybody should mention at least once a day “ seems to be the already legendary CSS3. This latest version of CSS is supposed to be every web-designers one-way ticket to a perfect website. No more floats that depend on the sequence in which elements are placed within your html, the ability to create simple animations without any scripting-language, the ability to use multiple background-images etc. But what can this new sibling of CSS2 do for us and is it going to make our lives easier? A small list of pros and cons on the matter.
Pros
Advanced alignment
Ladies and gentlemen your nights of cursing CSS and various browsers for not being able to align things the way we want to: the logical way, is over. No more artificially organising your divs to get them to float correctly: a grid which makes it possible to align basically everything pixel-perfect. Yes please!
Printing in CSS3
Landscape-orientation, portrait-orientation, binding-edge option (makes the margin at the side which is used to bind the material larger), whatever you want your visitors’ printer to do: CSS3 will make it do just that. A print-page was never before so easily controlled.
Scaling images
In css3 one can auto-scale images. Background-image will fit in the background of your website no matter how large or small the visitors’ screen-resolution is. Now, no one has an excuse for using those ugly image-repeats.
Guess who has great support for CSS3?
Adobes own AIR. Webkit is the way to go in adopting CSS3 and as Air supports webkit (just like iphone) we are bound to find CSS3 in there somewhere. This is quite a surprising player in the CSS3 support discussion.
Cons:
Do we need this?
How useful is it to be able to have access to another 5 different borders (besides dotted and dashed now also dot-dash-dot, dash-dot-dot-dash etc.). Does anyone actually care if your border is dash-dash-dash or dot-dash-dash-dot?
Why would we use CSS animations while we could just as well use Javascript (esp. nonintrusive javascript which does not add eventhandlers to your body code at all) or flash to achieve this? Especially considering the limited support in virtually all browsers of these CSS animations.
If it ain’t broken don’t fix it
Why is it that the W3 creates solutions to problems very few had to deal with: like the client that absolutely demands that that one border is dash-dot-dot-dash-dot-dot-dash? If our clients give us a hard time its usually something like:”Yeah I know we have to go live in 10 minutes, but could you just rearrange the entire menu-structure for me?”. And there’s no CSS that could help us out there…
If it is broken, fix it
In the same line of thought: wouldn’t it be great to after so many years to have a valid, cross-browser code to make a div transparent? Just about every browser supports this in one way or another (filters, opacity). If the code-blokes can’t come up with a cross-browser supported way to deal with this: just make the opacity-trick we know valid and deal with it?
Validate or be burned at the stake
Yes validation is important, yet fewer and fewer designers seem to care about this these days. Why is that? Maybe because a client demands a transparent image using css and your solution works in virtually every browser, but oh hell it doesn’t validate…hmmm. All too often we cannot validate a page because we have to use hacks to get past CSS own weaknesses.
Some support please
Browsers, even the latest versions still vary greatly in their support of CSS 2.1. Now it is understandable that the W3 refuses to focus on what the browser-guys are or aren’t doing. If the W3 would have waited for IE to catch on we would still be using tables to layout our pages (anyone remember that?). But most of CSS3 will only be supported by Safari and Opera and we are (sadly) still living in an IE world. But, but, but, I hear the CSS-guys opposing: we can fix it with Javascript! Oh, yeah and Javascript is a safe way to go (switching it off in your browser being just one click away).
Support is a enormous problem for CSS3, it would be best to consider it a standard for the (not so near, I am afraid) future. Ongoing struggles within the W3 group itself are greatly slowing down the development of CSS3. So we won’t be seeing a lot of CSS3 in the near future, but I you would like to try your hand at it: the latest Opera and Safari for Windows and Mac support a large amount of CSS3 possibilities (such as multiple background-images), enough to toy with. If you really want to ‘safely’ implement CSS3 in your webpages and are willing to take the risk with Javascript, check out Andy Clarke’s Transcending CSS for tips on using Javascript.
“Ongoing struggles within the W3 group itself are greatly slowing down the development of CSS3.”
Speaking from an insider’s perspective, I’m not really seeing that. What gives you that impression?
this for instance:
so I hope things are going smoothly!!
“Following Opera’s action, today I am calling on Bert Bos, chairman of the CSS Working Group, and those higher up within the W3C including Sir Tim Berners Lee, to immediately disband the CSS Working Group in its current form. I am asking for immediate action to be taken on the formulation of a replacement CSS Working Group that will include new members who are not the representatives of browser vendors…” Andy Clarcke (part of the css3 workinggroup and css11 (see here) wrote that in an article you can read here. That article is december last year, so hopefully all has been resolved. All that was triggered by the Opera-versus MS IE issue. Personally I can’t wait to get the multiple backgrounds into my css
As an insider what is your thought on the development of CSS3 at this stage?