A Word About CSS4
xanthir.com
xanthir.com
What difference does it make if someone uses the term "CSS4 Selectors" instead of "CSS Selectors Level 4"???
> Others start out at level 1, if they're something new (for example, Flexbox
"CSS Flexbox level 1" is a fair bit less confusing than "CSS1 Flexbox model". It would get even worse if a module moved to level 2.1!
HTML -> DHTML -> HTML5
JavaScript -> AJAX
CSS -> CSS2 -> CSS3 -> ____ -> Profit?
AJAX is largely part of DOM, it's just some http callbacks your browser provide to Javascript.
And what's with all the troll comments on his page? Looked like reddit got there first. I laughed.
In particular, a bunch of browsers don't support specifying background-size in the background shorthand yet. It's in modern WebKit, but that hasn't trickled down to mobile versions yet.
I imagine that, in part at least, is because the standards have taken so long to be codified.
We've been calling it CSS3 and it's been implemented gradually in browsers but it's still a working document and not a finished standard (and now it seems never will be).
The pace of required changed for the needs of web page production and rendering is faster than the pace of the standards confirmation.
If this is just to address this issue then why not have "selectors 3", or whatever, as a part of a point release.
As well (partially as a result of me writing this blog post), we're looking into changing our URL structure, which was originally settled on a decade ago, before we knew how we were going to do this "module" thing.
But hey, nice attempt at trolling.
On the contrary, it shows how by breaking things into smaller modules instead of a monolithic one, they got things moving along faster.
We can't really be sure of that can we. What we can be sure of is that there's no way to summarise the CSS standards compliance of a browser or to indicate concisely the browser level requirements of a website for a human. This I fear makes designing for the web a case of breaking down and designing for lots of individual UA that meet a list of hundreds of different point versions for different abilities instead of being able to simply design to a standard HTML5+CSS3 and readily see that the top X browsers will support (with some issues of course) the elements of those standards.
Instead of one current standard there are now hundreds of standards?!
No, but we can be sure that conceptually it's far better than the monolithic practice, which has been shown in the past to slow down the standardising process.
>What we can be sure of is that there's no way to summarise the CSS standards compliance of a browser or to indicate concisely the browser level requirements of a website for a human.
That was always true. I mean, we might have had a "way to summarise the CSS standard compliance", as in "this browser is CSS 2 compatible", but we never had a 100% compatible browser for any previous version. I doubt we still have a full CSS2 compatible browser engine, so so much for summarizing.
Now, it could be easier: we could have a browser that is 100% compatible with A, B, C, D CSS modules and lacks in X, Y, Z.
It's not like developers care about the overall compatibility. What they do care is "can I use this or that feature?". To say "this engine is 90% CSS3 compatible doesn't answer that". Only 100% compatibility would answer those kinds of questions ("yes, you can use ANY feature").
So, they way to summarise compliance will be, as it is the practice anyway, with some list of CSS features and Yes/No tick marks. And for some things, with the knowledge that for that module the engine has 100% compliance (easier to achieve than the ellusive 100% compliance over ALL modules).
In CSS2 there are about 500 or so different things that you'd need to list (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/indexlist.html).
I dispute that people care about 100% compatibility.
>So, they way to summarise compliance will be [...] some list of CSS features and Yes/No tick marks. //
I think you misunderstand the meaning of "summarise", "this engine is 90% CSS3 compatible" is a summary. Quirksmodes tables - http://www.quirksmode.org/css/contents.html - whilst useful during development aren't really something you can put before a user as an equivalent to an "HTML5" badge.
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/members
The mailing list is open to the public. If you do decide to participate, please treat it as you would when joining any long-standing forum.
Also, you mean shim I think.
A shiv is something you fashion out of a toothbrush and shove into the guts of somebody that mouthed off to you in the cafeteria in cell block A last week.
The name is html5shiv, and it is something you fashion out of javascript and shove into the guts of IE.