Inside The CSS Working Group

The IE team is active on several  W3C working groups such as SVG and HTML. As one of our three regular CSS Working Group (CSSWG) representatives, I wanted to follow up on the latest face-to-face meeting the group held at Apple in Cupertino at the end of last month by sharing some of the work and progress being made. While it aims to be representative of the three-day meeting, the list below is not exhaustive.

• CSS2.1 and the CSS test suite: the working group discussed many of the remaining open issues. Elika Etemad (fantasai), a CSSWG Invited Expert who consults for Mozilla, is now also working with Microsoft on the completion of the CSS2.1 test suite.
• Vendor prefixes: the CSS specification requires browser vendors to add a vendor prefix to property names when a feature is either:
  • A proprietary extension, or…
  • An experimental implementation of a Working Draft (when the specification reaches the Candidate Recommendation stage, the prefix should be dropped).

  This convention avoids name collisions between standard and proprietary features; it also enables browser vendors to gain implementation experience and gather valuable feedback from early adopters without impeding design progress on the specification. In practice, this can also result in authors writing multiple declarations of the same property. A common example today would be:

  -moz-border-radius: 10px;
  -webkit-border-radius:10px;
  border-radius:10px;

  Following up on feedback submitted to the www-style mailing list, the WG has begun discussing whether this convention needs to change to ease the authoring burden and support an accelerated pace of standardization for CSS features.

• Transitions and Animations: as well as a number of improvements on the current Transitions and Animations specifications, the CSSWG also followed up on mailing list feedback and proposals that aim to bring both features together both in terms of their capabilities and syntax.
• Fonts: with better cross-browser support for CSS3 Fonts and web font formats, work has begun to expose advanced typographic features through CSS.

On behalf of the CSSWG, we very much welcome the feedback and insights of web designers on www-style.

I am looking forward to the next CSSWG meeting at Opera in Oslo this summer. Regular engagement with the W3C, developers of other browsers, spec editors and experts invited from the broader community is not just exciting; we strongly believe it is necessary to advance the state of the web for all users.

Sylvain Galineau
Program Manager

Edit 11:26am: correcting the link to proprietary extensions definition.