CSS3 has been in committee for several years. The first few working drafts
came out in early 2001. Those involved announced that instead of attempting
a sweeping new version, they would roll out “modules” from time to time. Some
of the recommendations have begun to be supported in browsers already, and
other recommendations are likely to take years to even be formally proposed.
Internet Explorer 6 supports nothing from CSS3. That’s why I cover CSS3 fea-
tures only briefly in this book. No one yet knows what (if any) expansions of
CSS will appear in Internet Explorer 7, which will most likely appear in 2006.
Considering the market dominance that Internet Explorer enjoys, if IE 7 doesn’t
support these expansions, what the other browsers do doesn’t matter much,
unless of course Mozilla Firefox takes over the world in the meantime.
If you want to keep track of the latest recommendations and don’t mind
reading some white papers that plunge into exceptionally dreary academic
writing, you can find the papers on new ideas for CSS at http://www.w3.org/Style/
CSS/current-work.
Here are some of the more significant expected changes that fix existing
problems, or extend CSS capabilities:
Easier downloading of fonts.
Greater utility and flexibility in the design of table columns.
Greater control for users over color schemes. (This feature seems counter
to the idea that a designer should control such issues, in contrast to the
next point, which represents something of a contradiction.)
Color descriptions so that monitors can more accurately reproduce
what the Web page designer intended.
More dynamic control over the behaviors of various objects.
Working with Mozilla-supported CSS3 features .............................
Of the minor browsers, Mozilla’s Firefox seem to be the most interested in
adopting CSS3 features. It permits the use of the new attribute substring
selectors (*, $,and ^) to allow matches to parts of words in attributes. For
example, say that you want to indicate to viewers that a particular link is to
an Active Server Page (Active Server Page filenames end in. asp). Use the $to
indicate that the substring .asp is at the end of your target. This rule makes
all links to any page ending in .asp become red:
a[href$=’.asp’]{color: red;}
266 Part IV: Advanced CSS Techniques
