CSS3

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past six months, chances are you’ve heard of US interaction designers and strategists ZURB. Over the past few months their ZURBplayground has showcased some fantastic examples and demonstrations of the power of CSS3, alongside other web technologies, and has been covered by tens of thousands of blogs around the world.

Six Revisions put six questions to the estimable Eric Meyer on the subject of CSS3, and we get some nice link love.

Also (and I’m slightly late with this one) John Resig, creator of the jQuery library, runs an approving eye over the Advanced Layout Module. Webmonkey provide further context. We looked at the module back in 2006 (part one, part two), and my tongue-in-cheek prediction of a ten year wait to use it is now down to only eight years…

Next up in our now probably well known series of interviews is the lovely Jina Bolton, it’s good stuff, so keep reading!

1. Hi John, thanks for agreeing to this interview! Could you introduce yourself a bit to our readers?

   Sure! I’ve been a software developer, running my own company Westciv, with my business partner Maxine Sherrin since 1993. We’ve been selling software online since 1995, which of course lead us to web design and development (my interest in hypertext goes back to the 1980s, and our first application was in fact a hypertext knowledge management system.

Too many people see the Web a bit like television: who ever heard of incompatible content? If there is an error, it’s because the TV set is broken, or maybe the antenna. On the Web, it is much more likely that the content is invalid, but try to explain that to users who just want to buy their holiday or see their bank account…

A very interesting interview with Bert Bos, on the history and future of CSS.

The announcement of the formation of the CSS Eleven has caused quite a stir in the web development community, with a few questions raised over the self-appointed nature of the group and the way the announcement has been presented. One thing that everyone agrees on, however, is that there’s a clear and obvious need for their existence.

We spoke to Andy Clarke, respected designer and author, who announced the group’s formation (and explained it further here), and asked him a few questions about what we can expect from the CSS Eleven.

1. Please could you sum up very briefly for anyone who hasn’t read your introduction what the CSS Eleven is, and what you aim to do.

   One of the biggest challenges that the CSS Working Group faces is engineering solutions that meet the expectations of visual designers and developers. Leaving aside for a moment their other difficult tasks such as internationalization, understanding what designers need is a tough job; particularly as CSS gets more complex in the areas of layout, typography and other design related areas. The members of the working group, largely technical people, need help. They need practical help to understand what designers need, and in detail. This help cannot come simply from reading emails that are sent to them with suggestions. So far, the channels of communication between creative people and the CSS Working Group have been difficult and many people that I speak to feel that a new way needs to be found to get the designer’s voice heard and their needs understood.

   CSS Eleven is an informal group of visual designers and developers who have agreed to give up a little of their time to helping the CSS Working Group to understand what we need from CSS in the future. We will help by making suggestions, but more importantly by providing clear, real-world, visual, graphical examples of the results of the CSS that we need and helping with making test suites; two areas that have proven very time consuming in the past.

   Are we the only group that the Working Group will listen to? I hope not. We’re simply the first of what I hope will many ways that visual designers and developers get together to help make sure that CSS3 is what designers deserve it to be.

2. How will you arrive at the decisions as to which modules are most keenly needed?

   The decision to look at CSS Multi-Columns was purely mine as it is a mature draft with some features already available to test in some browsers. In the future I’m sure that efforts will be focussed on the modules that matter most to us as visual designers (personally, I’m particularly looking forward to seeing what happens with Advanced Layout). I’m sure that we’ll get lots of feedback and suggestions from the industry at large too.

3. Won’t it be hard to make judgements about implementation when there are no browsers available to test the more advanced features on?

   Of course implementation is important, and we would hope that the browser makers on the CSS Working Group will help us all they can by continuing to implement new features. For me as a visual designer, describing the features that I need from CSS visually is one of the most important jobs that I can do to help the development of CSS. We need clear, real-world visual examples from people who also understand CSS from an everyday working perspective. I’m sure that with so many great people volunteering, there will be plenty to work on.

4. What kind of timescale are you looking at for releasing the first batch of recommendations?

   I would think that we will two months working collaboratively on CSS Multi-Columns, after which I expect that we will open the wiki (or some similar facility) to a wider audience for a month before wrapping things up and handing it to the CSS Working group. Of course everybody involved is volunteering some of their valuable time, so time-scales may change.

5. Which aspect of CSS 3 are you personally most looking forward to?

   Grid Positioning and Advanced Layout will help to solve many of the problems that designers face every day using CSS. There has been a little confusion about the role of Grid Positioning and its relationship to Advanced Layout, but both are exciting developments that I am looking forward to seeing.

Here’s the concluding part of our interview with Håkon (you can read the first part here).

6. Name the top five CSS3 features you’d like all major browsers to support in their next major release.

   Here’s some of my favorites:

   • Backgrounds and borders
   • Media queries
   • Multi-column layout
   • Selectors
   • Paged media

   Also, we must not forget Generated content, and tables from CSS2.1. These are great features that still can’t be used due to lack of support from one browser.

7. Do you think there should be a Acid3 that focuses on CSS3 features that designs want supported as soon as possible?

   Yes, I think it’s time for another Acid test — all major browsers but one (guess which one!) support Acid2 by now. I believe Acid3 should test CSS3 features that a critical mass of browsers can agree to implement. Also, it should probably test features from the upcoming HTML5 and the DOM.

8. Do you have a favourite designer who you admire their work, either from a design or technical respect?

   I can’t give you one name. I often show designs from the CSS Zen garden when I give talks; I like many of them.

   I can name two favorite fonts designers, though: Ray Larabie and Dieter Steffmann.

9. How do you think designers can get more involved with the CSS3 progress, to make sure features designed by designers themselves are added to the spec, instead of the features the spec writers might think are important? Is there a way this can be done without designers (many who don’t have much free time to spare) having to read through long mailing list histories and understanding a lot of very technical implementation details (I’m thinking such as having a appointed advisory board of designers for example that advise what features they want, and gather feedback from others, then the implementers can discuss this and come back with issues or start to draft specs for those features)?

   We’ve always encouraged designers to be part of the CSS Working Group, and there has always been strong designer presence in www-style. Many of the choices we’ve made along the way are based on input from designers. For example, you wouldn’t find Backgrounds and borders on top of my list if it hadn’t been for designers. The idea of an advisory board may be a good one.

10. How do you feel about being nicknamed “the father of css”?

    I often refer to CSS as my baby, and I’m fine with being called the father :-) It must be emphasized, though, that the child was shaped by a community. Bert Bos was the first to join the efforts, he came with a proposal of his own that we worked into CSS. Thomas Reardon and Chris Wilson of Microsoft were also influential in the time before the CSS WG and and the www-style mailing list was started.

11. What do you think of the Brazilian band CSS?

    Wow. Right. Change of mindset. Music, right? When it comes to music, I prefer Opera!

We’ve had some great interviews with luminaries of CSS-based design here on CSS3.info already, but this one is my personal favourite! Håkon Wium Lie, ‘the father of CSS’*, spared us some time to answer a few questions about the evolution of web design and the future of CSS. I’m so excited by this, I’ve almost forgiven our friends at Opera for not letting us have an early preview of Opera 9.5!

1. Is the use of web fonts the next big step in web design?

   Yes! Web fonts will be the next big thing if browsers start supporting them. Fonts are one of the core ingredients of design, along with space and colors. CSS is pretty good with space, colors, and fonts, but in the case of fonts the raw materials — the font files — are in short supply. Interestingly, there are lots of freely available TrueType font that authors allow us to use for free. So, I’m trying to connect the dots between web pages and the available fonts. I’ve written more about this in an article in Alistapart and you can play with web fonts in Prince.

2. With the current battles over copyright infringement with music and video on the web, can you imagine something similar occurring over the misuse of rights-protected fonts?

   Almost all the content on the web is copyrighted. It’s still available because copyright holders want it to be available. Sure, there are cases when the copyright holder has not given permission. But I don’t think anyone would argue that we should remove all images, video or music from the web for this reason? There are plenty of freely available fonts out there and no need to use fonts with resistant owners. Also, plenty of new font will be created open-source style if browsers start supporting web fonts.

3. Has web design turned out more or less the way you imagined when you wrote the CSS spec so many years ago?

   CSS was partly about design, and partly about markup. We — Bert Bos and I in the beginning, soon others — wanted to improve web design, but also to keep markup clean. I think the first part has succeeded quite well; I continue to be amazed by the things people are able to do with CSS. I’m less certain about the markup. But you didn’t ask me about markup, so I don’t have to answer for it :-)

4. Outside of web fonts, which part of css needs most work in your opinion? And why?

   Lots of work has gone into the CSS specifications. That will continue, but it’s not where work is most needed. What we need now are implementations — interoperable implementations. In order to get them, we need tests and testers. Lots of them. People who are interested in this subject should join the CSS testsuite mailing list.

5. If you could start all over again, what would you do differently in CSS?

   I’ve written a long PhD thesis, in part on that subject. That’s the long answer. The short answer is that we should have published a test suite earlier. We worked hard to get the CSS1 specification right, but implementors don’t really like to read specifications. They will work long hours, however, for so that their code passes a well-designed test. Eric Meyer came to our rescue and made sure CSS1 got a the test suite.

Part two of this interview, where Håkon discusses CSS3 and web design, will be available shortly.

* Maybe we should have asked him what he thinks of that nickname!

Andy Budd is a well-known figure in the world of web development. If you haven’t heard him speak at one of the many conferences he attends (or even the one he helps organise), you may have read his book CSS Mastery or one of the many articles he has written.

Recently we mentioned Andy’s call for a new intermediary version of CSS, which includes all the most commonly implemented features of CSS3. This led to a fair bit of discussion in the community, so we asked Andy for some clarification of his suggestion (there’s more on his own blog too), as well as a few more thoughts on the future of CSS.

The future of webdesign part II

In part two of the interview series we’ve dubbed “the future of webdesign”, we have an interview with Veerle Pieters, one of the best webdesigners on this planet, and a lovely lady as well!

Check it out: