• Home
• Archives
• Tools   Resources
• About Allcreatives

I’ve been chewing on this for a while, my opinion on CSS3 that is. It is admittedly difficult to judge a spec. that has yet to be finalized but thus far, for me, CSS3 is making all the right noises. I couldn’t care any less for the animations and transitions but multiple backgrounds, border images and the like sound fantastic.

My ‘beef’ is not with CSS3 itself but more with the countless lists of cool stuff you can do with CSS3. As a language adds more and more features and the complexity of the code expands there needs to be some grounding. Those that know CSS and know it well will already but fully aware of the great additions CSS3 adds to the previous versions. Those that don’t know CSS too well are just being fed more and more code to copy and paste and this is where the problem starts.

CSS3 isn’t a new language that replaces the previous versions of CSS, it is merely an enhancement, an improvement of what has come before it. The original ideas and the underlying philosophies are still the same. With the limitations of CSS decreasing, the opportunity for sloppy, bloated code increases. The original premise of CSS of course being lean code that separates presentation and layout.

I suppose the point I’m trying to get at is that as a community we should still be encouraging people to go back and understand the basics of CSS before writing up another list of ‘cool’ techniques using CSS3. Les’ we forget that CSS3 is still a good few years away from being a viable language that is usable cross browser. Progressive enhancement you say? Folk concerned with progressive enhancement don’t need another ‘cool’ list, they’re already there, they aren’t reading these ‘cool’ lists posts because they don’t need to.

Grab our RSS feed for more of the same ...