Coding & Dreaming Beta

A recent post on CSS3.Info regarding the CSS WG F2F in San Diego nicely sums up resolutions relating to possible up-coming CSS features.

Two resolutions that the post doesn’t mention however, are to do with the public disclosure of dialogue within the Working Group relating specifically to IRC log’s and meeting minutes.

It was decided that from now on the WG’s minutes and also IRC logs will be made public; there was also talk about opening up process-related discussions into a new public mailing list, although this has apparently been put on the back burner for the moment.

Today, Peter Gasston posted an article summing up a recent post from Daniel Glazman talking about possible future extensions to CSS, and in particular Symbolic Constants.

I’m really trying to get my head round why this proposal was put forward (possibly because I’m particularly tired tonight and am missing some blatant advantages, in which case someone please point them out to me), but I’m really not sure why we’re trying to turn CSS into a programming language (see last two lines of Appendix E).

The past week has provided us with some interesting news.

First off, there’s been a hype of activity from both Webkit and Opera - Webkit’s blog kept us informed that it’s Acid3 DOM test score was increasing, it seemed every day, which ultimately led to it announcing on Wednesday that it had released a public build of a successful Acid3 rendering pass (but not an animation pass). This announcement came very soon (on the same day, in fact) after David announced that Opera’s latest internal build had passed all 100 DOM tests- it was just very unfortunate that some people misinterpreted this information and started accusing the Opera team of pulling stunts and deliberately trying to mislead - a sad state of affairs, especially because it came a result of this great news.

Well, at time of writing support is non existent even in the latest nightlies (3.0b5pre), which to me is a slight bit surprising since both Opera and Safari have supported Media Queries for while now. I guess the main push behind module support for both Opera and Safari was to ease web development for their mobile/handheld browsers.

However, what with Mozilla planning a full scale drive into the mobile browser market soon with the release of Firefox Mobile, it’s crucial that module support is included. Judging by the relevant bug ticket, it looks as though there’s not much going on; David Baron’s last entry was in November 2006 simply stating that support is WIP- perhaps I’m missing something?!

Yesterday, Dave Hyatt announced that the Webkit team have added a new proprietary value for the ‘background-clip’ property- go to my post on CSS3.Info to read more.

Perhaps the next nightly could removed the need for the webkit prefix on the ‘box-sizing’ property, rather than implementing any more proprietary features??

The age-old problem of having to use the conventional Level 2.1 box model in conjunction with padding and/or border values is solved using CSS3. Up until now, this problem was a major stumbling block for developers, particularly in the instance of specifying a border/padding value in relation to a fluid length element, but the new ‘box-sizing’ property answers this problem.

After browsing Eric’s site the other day, I came across a thread notifying readers that he had put together an amended reset stylesheet to help in the battle for cross browser compliancy. A List Apart also describes the same solution in more detail.

One thing that caught my eye was a declaration that Eric had input on from Paul Chaplin. The purpose of this particular declaration was to remove the quote marks that standards compliant user agents automatically generate around a Q tag using the :before and :after pseudo elements; the author then has a ‘blank canvas’ to work with where he/she can manually input the relevant ampersands into the markup.

With the closing date for developers able to feed back to the CSSWG regarding it’s revised charter being only a week away, a few of us at CSS3.Info are discussing among ourselves about what we would like to see in CSS3.

I recently published an article on CSS3.Info about a new technique I devised for creating tooltips using CSS3. The method uses the :before (or :after) pseudo element combined with the :hover pseudo class.