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Inside The CSS Working Group

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The IE team is active on several  W3C working groups such as SVG and HTML. As one of our three regular CSS Working Group (CSSWG) representatives, I wanted to follow up on the latest face-to-face meeting the group held at Apple in Cupertino at the end of last month by sharing some of the work and progress being made. While it aims to be representative of the three-day meeting, the list below is not exhaustive.

  • CSS2.1 and the CSS test suite: the working group discussed many of the remaining open issues. Elika Etemad (fantasai), a CSSWG Invited Expert who consults for Mozilla, is now also working with Microsoft on the completion of the CSS2.1 test suite.

  • Vendor prefixes: the CSS specification requires browser vendors to add a vendor prefix to property names when a feature is either:

    This convention avoids name collisions between standard and proprietary features; it also enables browser vendors to gain implementation experience and gather valuable feedback from early adopters without impeding design progress on the specification. In practice, this can also result in authors writing multiple declarations of the same property. A common example today would be:

    -moz-border-radius: 10px;
    -webkit-border-radius:10px;
    border-radius:10px;

    Following up on feedback submitted to the www-style mailing list, the WG has begun discussing whether this convention needs to change to ease the authoring burden and support an accelerated pace of standardization for CSS features.

  • Transitions and Animations: as well as a number of improvements on the current Transitions and Animations specifications, the CSSWG also followed up on mailing list feedback and proposals that aim to bring both features together both in terms of their capabilities and syntax.

  • Fonts: with better cross-browser support for CSS3 Fonts and web font formats, work has begun to expose advanced typographic features through CSS.

On behalf of the CSSWG, we very much welcome the feedback and insights of web designers on www-style.

I am looking forward to the next CSSWG meeting at Opera in Oslo this summer. Regular engagement with the W3C, developers of other browsers, spec editors and experts invited from the broader community is not just exciting; we strongly believe it is necessary to advance the state of the web for all users.

Sylvain Galineau
Program Manager

Edit 11:26am: correcting the link to proprietary extensions definition.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    « file:///C:/Users/sylvaing/Documents/Downloads » Whoopsie?

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2010
    I am excited about the enhanced support for many OpenType font features! I wonder if in 10-20 years time a common web browser will be a viable alternative to QuarkXpress, InDesign, Publisher, LaTeX and Co.

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2010
    Transitions and animations making it in to IE9? Now that would be pure icing on the cake! Custom fonts via CSS3? That would make me drool too! I think it's important that vendor prefixes exist. First and foremost as I've been implementing CSS3 properties for all browsers that support them and I'm heavily relying on object detection to determine which browser is which so even if the browser is spoofed it'll load the correct compiled CSS3 style sheet. There are some differences between how certain properties have been implemented such as one (can't remember offhand what it is, maybe gradients?) between Gecko and WebKit. As each standard (or in the case of CSS3 each module) becomes a final specification (or stable enough as far as the industry is concerned) then yes, I'd prefer to see those properties become standardized in browsers. For those who would like to see vendor prefixes disappear altogether forget it! There just isn't any justification for dumbing down the web and making our lives more difficult. Awesome post though you know I'd really like to see the W3C open a forum, mailing lists aren't my thing.

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2010
    请问可以快点出新版本？ 安装和升级可不可以快一些，比如一周一个新版本发布！

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2010
    @Sylvain Galineau [MSFT] CSS 2.1 and the CSS test suite ============================== IE8 fails over 150 testcases submitted in the CSS 2.1 test suite (alpha 2, build 20100316). What I'd like to know is

  • if these failures are fixed in the current IE9 platform preview
  • or if these failures will be fixed for the next IE9 preview
  • or if they are being tackled so that they will be fixed within the IE9 beta development. I am not referring to CSS 2.1 current issues or spec clarifications here but to undisputable, unquestionable CSS 2.1 testcase failures. Several testcases (say, about 100)  submitted by Microsoft to the CSS 2.1 test suite have inaccuracies or are not well/best written. Will they be corrected? Are they being worked on? Vendor prefixes =============== Both D. Glazman and you missed -khtml-border-radius used by Konqueror. Personally, the sooner browser vendors adopt the non-vendor-prefix for property names, the better it is for everyone involved. Transitions and Animations ========================== To me, this is just more "bells and whistles" which can be misused, abused, overused and which is often [unneedlessly] user system resources demanding. Content is and will still remain king. regards, Gérard

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2010
    @Sylvain Galineau "The IE team is active on several  W3C working groups such as SVG " IE9 preview fails in 72% of SVG ( the other browsers fails 15-20% ). Would you share with us the IE team goals regarding SVG support in IE9? Do you target 40% of compliance? 50% 70% ? Thanks in advance

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2010
    I think seamless interops with Silverlight will be great. And <canvs> or <sence>! And NO MORE COM !

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2010
    @Gerard Talbot Where is the list of those 150 failed tests?

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2010
    @carlos As you probalby read on this blog before the SVG implementation scheduled for IE9 is not yet completed and is significantly more than is currently available in the preview.

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2010
    Thank you for sponsoring WOFF. I just want to share my desire for WOFF fonts to be available in IE9. You're doing nice.

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2010
    My suggestion for vendor prefixes: add something like vendor-prefixes: ms, webkit, moz; use-vendor-prefixes-for: border-radius, border-style; to CSS / so if there is "border-radius" in CSS -> browser will try all vendor prefixes

  • Anonymous
    April 22, 2010
    @ "...the WG has begun discussing whether this convention needs to change to ease the authoring burden and support an accelerated pace of standardization for CSS features." I surely hope all browsers include a default "px" for style size/locations. This perticular point is the biggest problem for the migration of legacy sites to standardization. Also, It will remove the mind-numbing process of including "px" for web developers in the future.

  • Anonymous
    April 22, 2010
    @Francis: Are you serious? eyeroll

  • Anonymous
    April 22, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 22, 2010
    « If authors want predictability, they should stick to the finalized standards. » Will they? That is the question. And what has history told us?

  • Anonymous
    April 22, 2010
    The comment has been removed