My feedback to the CSS WG for CSS3

With the closing date for developers able to feed back to the CSSWG regarding it’s revised charter being only a week away, a few of us at CSS3.Info are discussing among ourselves about what we would like to see in CSS3.

Whilst I have no real hands-on experience of developing on mobile platforms, I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on the subject recently, particularly with regards to proposed CSS3 support. With regards to Media Queries, I think we can take it as a given that FF Mobile (proposed release to follow general release of FF3) will support at least the relevant part (in relation to mobile environments) of the module. It would be a fairly regressive step for FF Mobile to rely on conventional methods of stylesheet designation. However, I’ve tested some simple, relevant Media Queries in the latest nightly FF 3b Pre4, and as of yet there’s no support for them, which is slightly worrying if they are to stay in line with what their other vendors are using (supported by Opera & Safari) – FF needs to get a move on! With the recent surge of the iPhone etc, I deem this module to be of the upmost importance.

My personal opinion is that the W3C were right in leaving out Text Level 3 out of their Snapshot; I think a lot of these properties (text-shadow, word-wrap) should have a pretty low priority – I feel there’s far more pressing modules (Advanced Layout etc) to get out the door first. It seems that developers at Firefox are taking a similar stance to mine – View the bug status.

I’d like to see the Backgrounds & Borders module to be formalized, prioritising the ‘background-size’ property at least. I can see the obvious benefits to using this property in combination with SVG’s, to create a more flexible alternative to using the ‘box-shadow’ property – multiple backgrounds would be cool too.

The Basic UI module includes some innovative yet practical properties that should be implemented – the one I deem most important is ‘box-sizing’, for obvious reasons of using borders in conjunction with fluid width elements.