and for font, you want CSS3 specification for @font-face (see here)

Better CSS Support in general is probably the single biggest “wish list” item I have. Back end development languages can now do more than ever, more easily than ever. Functionally, I’ve been able to do whatever I could imagine design-wise with PhotoShop for years (although productivity/usability and performance enhancements along the way are always good).

But CSS support…I’m totally tired of the hacks and workarounds and cross browser issues and tricks that it takes to create a beautiful design that degrades gracefully! While CSS has done wonders for maintainability, bandwidth consumption, and SEO/semantic markup, it still feels like a dull blade for design.

Standardistas make the case for “forward compatibility” but look what happened to so many sites when IE 7 came out! I know that’s a MS issue, not a “standards” issue, but I’m sick and tired of it nonetheless. Old table-based layouts that I did in the late 90s still seem more “solid” than some of the CSS ones I did 2 years ago. I know there are CSS experts making standards “work” …with the resources of a large corporation. But my main point here is that it should not be so hard.

If anything I think we can at least bank on the fact that this industry changes rapidly and it will certainly get better. I for one am really looking forward to that day!

I’d love for Internet Explorer to support display:table-cell and the other table values, :before and :after pseudo-elements (and, once the relevant CSS 3 specifications make it to Candidate Recommendation stage, for all major browsers to support the full CSS 3 pseudo-element model with ::inside and ::outside included), and the “inherit” value for all properties (which the IE team also doesn’t seem to think is a high priority). But near the top of my priority list is getting rid of the hasLayout model in favor of the standard block formatting context model, which the IE developers actually do agree is a high priority. hasLayout is responsible for a huge portion of the rendering inconsistencies you see in IE, since in a lot of ways it’s like IE is using two separate layout engines depending on whether or not the element has layout.

I definitely agree that we need a Photoshop for Linux, as the Gimp just doesn’t cut it. My biggest problem with the Gimp is that you can’t apply layer effects that may later be adjusted like you can in Photoshop. I’m not a “natural” when it comes to design work; I have to tweak stuff until it’s right, and the Gimp makes tweaking a lot more of a hassle than it should be. I normally run Photoshop in Wine, although every so often (as is the case right now) some Wine update causes Photoshop to stop functioning correctly, and I have to either downgrade or use my Windows laptop until a fix comes out.

One thing to look out for though: Be careful with conditional comments that don’t include IE > 7. If you don’t opt in to the CSS improvements, then IE.next will need all of the same hacks you’re giving to IE 7. Rather than using the “lte IE 7″ condition, you should use just “IE”, and rather than the “IE 7″ condition, you should use “gte IE 7″.

…then again, that might make my job so easy, I get bored.

I’d really like to use some different fonts for headers and whatnot. Arial, Georgia, and Tahoma get boring after a while.

I don’t think Inkscape or Scribus are alternatives to the entire CS3 suite but infact are alternatives to Illustrator only. But I completely agree that Linux needs Photoshop and possibly the entire CS3 suite. The others are still lacking in many ways :(.

I guess I should have clarified… “Replacements for other products in the CS3 suite” might have been better.

Scribus is seen as a replacement for InDesign though, not Illustrator.