A couple of quick updates

Over at Design Shack they’re four posts into the five-post Introduction to CSS3, which covers Borders, Text Effects, the User Interface and (coming soon) Multiple Columns. A nice intro to the subject if our own examples are too complicated for you :p

The new owners of the Fonts and Web Fonts modules, Jason Cranford Teague and John Daggett, say that only about 20% of the Web Fonts module is required for CSS (it is currently part of the SVG charter), and propose simplifying it before merging with the Fonts module. They hope to have a working draft of the new spec in August.

Shaun Inman proposes CSS Qualified Selectors

Shaun Inman did a very interesting post yesterday on what he describes as “CSS Qualified Selectors”. The idea is nice, he wants to be able to do:

a {
    text-decoration: none;
    color: #A10;
    border-bottom: 1px dashed #A10;
}

And then for images:

a < img { border: none; }

So if <img> has a parent <a>, the border isn’t there.

What’s most interesting about the post though is the comments. It seems, as Eric Meyer states there, that this kind of selector has been discussed quite a few times on the CSS mailing list, and isn’t doable. Dave Hyatt, one of the core WebKit developers, comments with a good explanation of why it can’t be done. It’s a nice read, and a good insight into the difficulties of developing a new standard.

A further opportunity to help evolve CSS 3

Jason Cranford Teague has volunteered to edit the CSS Basic UI, CSS Hyperlink Presentation, CSS Fonts and CSS Web Fonts modules and is looking for feedback from users on the latter two. He asks:

Tell me what you think are some of the font styles and features missing from the current specification. What do you expect to be able to do with typography on your Web pages that you can not do now? What are you doing now with kludges that you would like to see simpler ways of doing?

Leave a comment on his blog if you have any ideas; and why not leave a comment here, too, to let us know what your opinions are? No deadline has been given, but I suppose it’s the sooner, the better.

Debug CSS3 (and more) with a dragonfly

Opera has one of the better levels of support for CSS3 (and other standards), making it an ideal platform for experimenting with future technologies and new techniques that these standards will offer. However, this has always been let down by the fact that Opera is very lacking in the web developer tools segment. To be frank, Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar blow away anything Opera has offered in this realm.

This short coming is about to change soon. Opera has just announced today, with the release of Opera 95 beta 2, that Opera Dragonfly will be Opera’s web developer tools. These will be released as an alpha on the 6^th of May. In line with their alpha status, the tools will not be feature complete, but they will show a good foundation of Opera’s developer tool vision.

Once released, Opera is looking for feedback on the tools, to make sure they fit the needs of real world web developers and designers. I’m looking forward to web developers getting their hands on the Opera Dragonfly and finding out what the impressions are. If you are interested then go the the Opera Dragonfly website on the 6^th or just open the Web Developer menu item from the tools menu. In the mean time, Opera 9.5 beta 2 (Kestrel) has been released today, so it is a good time to check out what CSS3 properties it supports.

Webkit provides implementation of CSS-based gradients

I don’t have time at the moment to write a good summary, but the link to the announcement is below which includes some examples

CSS Gradients in Webkit