The W3C’s CSS specification update this week caught a number of people in the blogosphere off guard, by the look of things. I’ve gotten quite a few emails on the subject over the last couple days, and thought I’d address one of them here.

From Sean:

Hey Phil, just wanted to get your input on the W3C’s specification markup updates - specifically, what do you make of the new element templates for the angle and dropshadow items? Can you see them catching on?

Hey Sean, thanks for the email. In a word: Definitely!

When I first caught wind of the spec update the other day, I was much more thrilled about the dropshadow property implemented, but I’ve since come to see the good in the angle property as well. For what it’s worth, however, I should mention that my favourite overall addition was the fill property. I’ve already been experimenting with that one, here’s a quick example:

.gradheader {
fill-type: gradient #000 #999;
fill-direction: top left;
fill-noise: none;
}

So, you can probably tell why I’m excited about that; no more pesky messing around with images and gradient/fades! Throw a fill-transparency attribute in there and you can get some real nice effects, even over top of your images, etc. This essentially means less photoshop-hacking and more efficient CSS/xhtml integration, which has me thrilled.

Next, let’s take a look at the ones you specifically mentionned: angle and dropshadow. Let me say in advance that I can very easily see these being abused by the average myspacer.

.phototilt {
width: 200px;
height: 120px;
angle: 45;
border: 4px solid #ccc;
dropshadow: 1px 5px 5px 1px 35% #000;
}

So, what we have is an image, 120px by 200px, rotated on a 45-degree angle (anywhere from 0 to 360 degrees are availble; any other value is rendered to normal scale inconsequentially), with a light grey border and a drop shadow set to 35% visibility black, offset 5px from the right and bottom, and 1px from the top and left. Not too shabby!

Certainly, though, there is room to improve; there is an inability to set any attributes of the dropshadow to have a gradient effect, or that fade as they move away from the object. This is something of an oversight that I’m none too pleased with, but I’m sure will be addressed.

The other thing, of course, is getting going to be getting the IE7 team to comply to these before the new browser is released; otherwise, it could be a very hectic design season. In any case, it should make things a good bit more interesting around the design community.

Happy experimenting!

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