log

Yay, a future with­out alpha-PNG’s mas­querad­ing as gra­di­ents (or hav­ing to cre­ate an SVG for a sim­ple white fade).

Webkit’s lat­est won­der-fea­ture for design­ers (in addi­tion to the font ren­der­ing I love, rel posi­tioned gen­er­at­ed con­tent, text & box shad­ows, hsla/rgba sup­port and mul­ti­ple back­grounds) is ven­dor-pre­fixed sup­port for CSS Gra­di­ents. I’m encour­aged know­ing that Hyatt is on the CSSWG with a bunch of inter­est­ing specs pro­posed already.

Of course the nor­mal warn­ing for an incom­plete/ven­dor-pre­fixed fea­ture applies: don’t use it in a pro­duc­tion envi­ron­ment since the spec will change dur­ing stan­dard­i­s­a­tion. It’s unfor­tu­nate, but even the well-known CSS3 fea­tures like bor­der-radius (round­ed cor­ners) aren’t nailed down yet.

First off, lol.

Nice epi­taph for CSS Eleven, an emp­ty web page that made a lot of buzz but con­tributed zilch to CSS, a stan­dard from the W3C where all is about vol­un­teer work, in more than six months.

Sec­ond­ly, it’s worth men­tion­ing this arti­cle on CSS3.info. Read the vari­ables spec at least — it’s short (so far), sim­ple and solves a long­stand­ing prob­lem. Apple’s three specs are more involved. It’s the trans­forms I’m most excit­ed by; Ani­ma­tions and Tran­si­tions are declar­a­tive sub­sets of JS DOM manip­u­la­tion, and like Peter Gasston I have reser­va­tions. In my mind it comes down to whether the 80/20 rule is being served (cov­er­ing sig­nif­i­cant use-cas­es) and whether keyframe data con­sti­tutes pol­lut­ing style sheets. I def­i­nite­ly feel that keyframe data does­n’t belong in CSS.

I like to be prac­ti­cal how­ev­er, and in this sit­u­a­tion CSS is a con­ve­nient, exten­si­ble deliv­ery mech­a­nism with estab­lished pars­ing and fall­back rules wide­ly imple­ment­ed. Of course this means the spec has a greater chance of imple­men­ta­tion than a com­plete­ly new pro­pos­al for Cas­cad­ing Ani­ma­tion Sheets with new pars­ing rules. We have to weigh the val­ue of CSS puri­ty vs hav­ing a work­able alter­na­tive to the “tra­di­tion­al” ani­ma­tion options such as Flash. JS ani­ma­tion is a niche, does­n’t fit to the devel­op­er audi­ence and the tools just aren’t there. Anoth­er five year wait for a sim­ple ani­ma­tion sys­tem could pret­ty much kill any chance of adop­tion later.

On the oth­er hand, I don’t think any­one involved in the ini­tial SVG spec imag­ined it’d ever include raw sockets.

I love read­ing posts like Daniel’s on the CSSWG:

We want less per­fec­tion­nism, a bit more for­mal­ism, ope­ness but not chaos, pri­or­i­ti­za­tion and RECs, RECs, RECs.

Progress, goals and aligned inter­ests make me happy.

Daniel men­tions CSS Vari­ables (!) in a pre­vi­ous post, but unfor­tu­nate­ly the linked dis­cus­sion is W3C member-only.

I was read­ing Plan­et Mozil­la and some­how got lead through a nest of arti­cles to Flock. I’d seen them men­tioned sev­er­al times in tech­ni­cal cir­cles but had­n’t tried the brows­er out. So I did, and decid­ed to do a stream-of-con­scious­ness review of my first half an hour with the prod­uct. Spelling and gram­mar beware!

—

—-

My longest blog entry this year :P

Flock­’s fea­ture­set and inte­gra­tion feels pret­ty vast at first glance. Bar the ini­tial UI con­fu­sion I enjoyed play­ing with the whole My World fea­ture, and the media bar is great. The built-in feed mon­i­tor­ing should strike fear into the heart of any obses­sive-com­pul­sive users; I found myself look­ing at the My World feeds way too often.

The prac­ti­cal­i­ty of hav­ing so many com­mon web ser­vices inte­grat­ed direct­ly with the brows­er is obvi­ous. Right now I’ve got GMail mon­i­tored, there’s updat­ed news to read, and some­one’s post­ed new media con­tent. I can tell that just by three tool­bar but­tons being lit up. That’s great.

It’s tempt­ing to think that some, if not most of this func­tion­al­i­ty could be intro­duced to Fire­fox via exten­sions, and maybe it already is; I haven’t looked. Hav­ing only spent a short time with Flock I expect I haven’t dis­cov­ered two-thirds of the func­tion­al­i­ty. Just hov­er­ing the tool­bar hints at Blog inte­gra­tion, Pho­to upload and a web clip­board fea­ture. There’s the Peo­ple side­bar, which is some­thing unex­plored. A quick glance shows how sim­ple it makes con­tact man­age­ment over sev­er­al web­sites (maybe that’ll change with OpenSocial/DataPortability/Passport et al, but like­ly not). I haven’t ful­ly explored the range of sup­port­ed web ser­vices either.. there’s prob­a­bly an exten­si­bil­i­ty mech­a­nism for that.

Flock is well worth check­ing out.

I’ve made con­sid­er­able changes to the CSS3 Playtest in my work area. Brows­er sup­port has improved for a lot of fea­tures, so I’ve added extra niceties to break con­sis­tent ren­der­ing across browsers. Off the top of my head I’ve added:

• Selec­tor tests for nth-* prop­er­ties (broke first-line stuff in FF2&3)
• Gen­er­at­ed con­tent, posi­tioned rel­a­tive to own­er box (only sup­port­ed by Safari3/Webkit & Opera 9.*)
• HSLA colour selec­tion for some bor­ders and box shad­ows (broke Opera 9.5)
• Mul­ti­ple back­ground images (only sup­port­ed by Safari3/Webkit)

Webkit’s sup­port for CSS3 fea­tures like text and box shad­ows con­tin­ues to make me hap­py, and the Apple-style font ren­der­ing is beau­ti­ful com­pared to hideous Win­dows Cleartype. I’m a lit­tle con­cerned that Opera ren­ders shad­ows dark­er (I think Oper­a’s in the right) but it’s sure to be evened out (and may be relat­ed to the font ren­der­ing anyway).

The page is doc­u­ment­ed (both code and inline) with break­downs of how exist­ing browsers behave and ref­er­ences to bug reports. Bug report links for Opera and Webkit are lack­ing, but it’s a start. If you find any­thing wrong, let me know.

CSSEleven.com. Does­n’t this come across as too goofy to be tak­en seri­ous­ly? After star­ing with bleak won­der at the cap­i­talised mar­ketroid copy

CSS Eleven is an inter­na­tion­al group of visu­al web design­ers and devel­op­ers who are com­mit­ted to help­ing the W3C’s CSS Work­ing Group to bet­ter deliv­er the tools that are need­ed to design tomor­row’s web

I feel the uneasy sen­sa­tion that the group does­n’t have a firm idea of how to achieve this. Lack­ing an agen­da or man­i­festo and thus forg­ing on direc­tion­less, the site becomes a rolling adver­tise­ment for the eleven’s com­pa­nies, blogs & books, with wordy intro­duc­tions that are unnec­es­sary for the tar­get audi­ence and will prob­a­bly be skipped, because hon­est­ly who wants to read eleven resumés of the self-elected?

At this point I was going to make a crack about CSST­welve with Julia Roberts, but instead I’ll get seri­ous: The group aims to ral­ly design­ers instead of hav­ing them whine piece­meal on dis­parate forums for the next ten years. This is a wor­thy cause; with the WHATWG’s effort reach­ing crit­i­cal mass a com­mu­ni­ty CSS group has a sig­nif­i­cant chance of chang­ing the Work­ing Group’s direc­tion. Keep­ing the yap­ping mass con­tent (and cor­rect­ly informed) while man­ag­ing use­ful sug­ges­tions will take con­sid­er­able time and effort; a quick peek at the first two months of HTML5WG emails demon­strates how peo­ple can get most upset that their issue has­n’t even been dis­cussed yet (that may or may not be a sly nod to some­one in the CSSEleven.)

(An aside: Fan­ta­sai’s trea­tise on the CSSWG gave peo­ple a fair idea about the lim­it­ed time and man­pow­er avail­able to the poor souls bur­dened with plan­ning CSS’ future, but I’ve always felt that CSS3’s mod­u­lar approach was the begin­ning of the fall; I’m pleased to see news of a “CSS snap­shot” of sorts. It’s still not the right approach, and does noth­ing to com­bat the per­fec­tion­ism trap—If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well—that’s under­stand­ably dif­fi­cult to avoid when writ­ing unver­sioned specs, but it’s a won­der­ful line in the sand for brows­er vendors.)

I wish the CSSE­leven the best of luck, and may they soon have some con­tent, a blog and a com­mu­ni­ty meet­ing place.

Time for bed!