Reedus has been using CSS to not only style websites but were one of the first companies to adopt pure CSS positioning back in 2004 when browsers’ awful support of the CSS 2.0 recommendation were so weak we ending up pulling our hair out over the simplest of tasks. Not deterred we were rewarded with “better” support from the major browsers over the last few years.
Well, just when we are all singing and dancing at how more compliant (we use this term loosely) browsers have become, CSS 3.0 has been threatening to rear its head for a while now.
So why is CSS 3.0 worthy of a blog post?
Multi columns
When we define 2 or 3 column layouts we achieve this by using multiple divs (boxes to the non-geek) and populating the content across the page. By using such markup we can essentially use less code and populate pages easier, especially for dynamic pages.
Formatting of tables for showing data
You know the nice effects you can do in Excel to highlight alternate rows? In CSS 2.0 this is a pain and only possible with using two classes and setting each row to a specific class. With CSS 3.0 you can define which style each rows has at a table level.
Text formatting
This was part of CSS 2.0 but only Opera and Safari bothered to support it. It allows websites to use HTML with no Flash replacement (clever code to render text in Flash if font not available) to do things like drop shadow.
Attribute selectors
This sounds like something you would discuss at a geeks’ convention but essentially this allows websites to standardise styles based on text, for example. If you had a heading for a section of “A heading feast” we could treat all text under it with a certain styling without adding the specific mark-up needed in CSS 2.0.
Don’t get carried away with any of the above just yet as most browsers still don’t support CSS 2.0. An acid test was created to test all browsers with very mixed results.
