Mark Best

The CSS 3 news never really gets too quiet out there, I think that more coders and designers than ever have their heads down and hands dirty in CSS 3. How do I know? Well more tutorials and examples are being made all the time and more and more mentions are popping up on the various design and development blogs. Are your hands dirty enough? I know mine weren’t so I set out to see what’s new in for this summer as it draws to a close.

The entire web development community is on board with HTML 5 and for good reason. Modernizr is a great tool to help you stay cutting edge without alienating your visitors who aren’t running the latest and greatest browser releases. Currently friendly with Safari 4, Firefox 3.5, Operate 10b1 and IE 8, this JS library is definitely handy.

The simplicity and elegance with which many common interface elements can be handled with CSS 3 is part of the attraction to the new standard. Border-radius, border-image etc in particular as well as a handful of other styling options are at the heart of a very practical interface technique that doesn’t need any imagery. Sprites were a quite practical way to improve page load response time, feel of an interface and simplify maintenance, but if you can remove the need for images altogether for parts of your interface (a dream come true), now you’re on your way to interfaces that are easier to support and give you more leverage. Sean Martell (Much ado about pixels) has a great practical example worth checking out.

The ever prolific John Resig weighed (as did Eric Meyer) in the past on the CSS 3 specification and the template layout issues that many have with the proposal. Anyway, the topic was rekindled by Alexis Deveria discussing the jQuery plugin that eventually arose from the topic.

Do you feel this kind of approach is practical? What about libraries like Modernizr? I personally spoke to John about things like this early last year and am excited to see them appearing. Let us know in the comments if you’d rather see CSS focused on elegant (and native) implementation of practical features, or if you appreciate the value JavaScript can contribute.