Posted by on Monday, March 22nd, 2010 at 8:18 pm.
At Creare we like to keep our eye on the latest goings on in the web world. We can’t help but notice that more and more web designers are starting to throw caution to the wind and freely use the highly anticipated CSS3.
With support generally quite low from major browsers, but the death of IE6 well in the pipeline maybe it’s time for a change.
The features and benefits of CSS3
CSS3 offers some great new selectors, which will give web designers, not only better looking designs, but also many time-saving strategies to get the desired final result.
Here are some of the new selector highlights offered in the highly anticipated CSS3 release…
- Border images, radiuses and box shadows
- Background size and multiple background images
- Opacity of colours
- Text effects including shadows
- User interfaces such as box sizing and resizing
- Advanced selectors for identifying first and last nodes
- Speech, Multi –column layouts and web fonts
Why web designers should…
One of the main reasons why web designers are pushing for the widespread uptake of this latest CSS specification is down to aesthetics. Little design touches such as rounded corners and drop shadows will mean that your websites will look even better.
Aside from enhancing the look of your website, web designers are striving for CSS3, as it will introduce many time saving factors. At present, designers are still looking to implement rounded corners of boxes and elements, but it just means following a long winded process such as four separate corner images. The uptake of CSS3 would mean just one simple statement will suffice.
Even though browser support is an issue, the fact that rounded corners will degrade gracefully to square corners, implies that it’s by no means the end of the world to do so.
And why they shouldn’t…
The first and most major reason not to use CSS is the fact that many browsers, including all versions of Internet explorer do not support CSS3. This means that any CSS3 styles, such as rounded corners, box shadows, text shadows etc will not show.
Secondly, if you strive to build your websites to W3C standard, then you will encounter problems. Currently, W3C does not state that browsers should offer support for CSS3, meaning that your website will fail validation on this front. You can always avoid this last point by ensuring that all of your experimental selectors are stored in a separate style sheet meaning that your main CSS document will indeed validate.
The final verdict
I feel that with the all of the above considered, as long as you can make your website W3C standards compliant, still looks right in all browsers, then why the hell not! At the end of the day, if nobody starts using CSS3, then there will be not rush for all browsers to support it. Web Designers are often at the forefront of technologies, and push for the latest in technologies, so why are we hanging around for people who want to use old browsers. Come on, Monkey see monkey do!
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