CSS level three..

Hopefully you web designers and programmers is using CSS 2.1 today. But what about the next step...
Well when you start develop sites that are larger then the normal small personal web site you will often get into trouble when the CSS standard can't do all the magic you would like it to do with for instance, your texts and layouts.

I came across a problem recently when I got words that were to long for my boxes. A really helpful thing that isn't  implemented in the CSS "standard" but for the CSS for IE it is the word-wrap: break-word; feature that is implemented in IE, but what if you are developing sites that will be used by users that actually use another browser like FireFox.. :) (you will probably need some code magic and that's not good for the performance of the site...) so could the next level of CSS help us designers out there? Well, Yes! :)

Since 1994, W3C has been working with standards regarding the web and lately specially with CSS. Today level 3 is being developed and will contain both level one and two. We will probably see CSS 3 in the early 2011, hopefully sooner.

For designer there will be new module for advanced layout. It will combine the best benefits of tables and absolute positioning. It will allow designers to specify a grid with only 2 rows of code in CSS and then putting elements into that grid.

Another great featured is new possibilities for printing. Today's printing from web pages is poor and not even near printing from programs like MSWord but CSS3 will hopefully bring some light into that area as well. (http://www.w3.org/TR/css-print/)

So what is new?

1. Advanced layout module.
2. Support for vertical text, like Japanese.
3. Columns with flowing text.
4. Page attributes like pagenumber, pagefooter and pageheader.
5. Rounded corners on block elements.
6. Downloadable fonts.
7. more possibilities to style vector graphics like svg.

Hopefully we can start use all these nice features soon and it will make life a better place for web developers when implementing cool designs in our EPiServer CMS sites.

If you would like some more information about CSS3 please have a look at these sites: http://www.css3.info/, http://www.css3.com/, http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/

/Eric