The Future of Style aggregates posts from various blogs that talk about the development of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) [not development with Cascading Style Sheets]. While it is hosted by the W3C CSS Working Group, the content of the individual entries represent only the opinion of their respective authors and does not reflect the position of the CSS Working Group or the W3C.

W3C invites Web developers to the Developer Meet-up in Tokyo…

The W3C Italian Office organizes a day around HTML and CSS, …

Peter-Paul Koch, Krijn Hoetmer, and Stephen Hay are the orga…

CSS3 Box Alignment Update

The CSS Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of CSS Box Alignment Level 3. CSS3 Box Alignment defines a common set of properties for aligning boxes within their containers in the various CSS box layout models: block layout, table layout, flex layout, and grid layout. In particular, it attempts to provide the horizontal and vetical alignment capabilities missing from CSS block layout and to tie that together with alignment models in tables, grid, and flexbox.

This draft is a revision of the previous First Public Working Draft: the range of values allowed in each alignment property has been extended and improved, and many details have been added on how exactly alignment works in various layout contexts, including absolutely-positioned layout.

Changes since the last publication are listed in the changes section. It’s still in the exploratory stages, but this revision starts the process of stabilizing the overall design.

As always, please send feedback to the (archived) public mailing list www-style@w3.org with the spec code ([css-align]) and your comment topic in the subject line. (Alternatively, you can email one of the editors and ask them to forward your comment.)

Minutes Telecon 2013-05-15

• Resolved: Publish Last Call of CSS3 Fonts (next Thursday).
• Resolved: Split Exclusions and Shapes into separate modules.
• Republication of Multicol deferred until more issues can be resolved.
• Resolved: Publish new WD of CSS Filters.
• Resolved: @counter-style width descriptor renamed to pad.
• Resolved: Decoration color is reflected in text-shadow
• Discussed dbaron’s issues wrt text-decoration positioning
• Resolved: calc() can be used inside media queries
• Discussed return value of getComputedStyle() for grid layout properties.
• Discussed an+b syntax redefinition in CSS3 Syntax.

Full minutes

Minutes Telecon 2013-05-08

• Resolved: Publish Box Alignment WD.
• Discussed issue of synthesizing obliques in vertical text. This was a controversial topic and missing key people; no conclusion yet.
• Resolved: Accepted proposal for fixing computed value of unresolvable percentage heights in CSS2.1. (Bug 15392)
• Discussion of whether and how table cells form pseudo-stacking contexts deferred to F2F for whiteboardability.
• Resolved: Accept start/end proposal for both axes as described in Tab and fantasai’s proposal.
• Reviewed open issues in CSS3 Text Decoration Disposition of Comments

Full minutes

Selectors Level 4 Updated

The CSS Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of Selectors Level 4. Selectors is a pattern-matching syntax for identifying sets of elements in a document, and is used e.g. for applying CSS declarations to elements in a document tree.

Additions include some new selectors: :blank for elements that are empty or contain only white space, and :placeholder-shown for inputs that are showing a placeholder. Review and improved naming suggestions are particularly welcome on these—and also on the drag and drop pseudos.

Another important change is lifting restrictions on :matches() and :not() to accept complex selectors, and the definition of two profiles, one for CSS matching and another for less performance-intensive uses like querySelector. We particularly encourage implementers to comment on whether this split is reasonable, or whether different things should be included/excluded.

The Working Draft includes a list of changes since the previous WD.

As always, please send feedback to the (archived) public mailing list www-style@w3.org with the spec code ([selectors]) and your comment topic in the subject line. (Alternatively, you can email one of the editors and ask them to forward your comment.)

Minutes Telecon 2013-05-01

• Resolved: Move existing Template Layout doc on TR to Note, and keep the ED.
• Tokyo F2F location moved from Mozilla office to Google office (same neighborhood).
• Resolved: Rebecca Hauck takes over CSSWG testing ownership from fantasai.
• Resolved: Paris F2F at Mozilla Sept 11-13
• Reviewed CSS3 Fonts issues
• Discussed issues with overflowing floats in multicol.
• Resolved: In grid, percentages work as per block layout, not as per table layout
• Resolved: auto margins specified on grid items override the align-self property values, like they do in other layout modules such as flexbox (and also block)

Full minutes

The CSS WG updated the Working Draft Selectors Level 4

Test the Web Forward – Seattle 2013

On April 12-13, Microsoft hosted a record-setting Test the Web Forward event to advance the Web by creating interoperability tests. Dozens of volunteers from Adobe, AT&T, Blackberry, Mozilla, and many other local companies joined us at our Seattle offices to learn about Web standards testing, how to write CSS and HTML tests, as well as the tools available for test suite management. Attendees from around the country - and even Canada – contributed to create a record-breaking 514 overall new tests.

Why Tests?

The quality and correctness of different browsers’ HTML and CSS standards compliance continues to vary widely. The W3C requires independent tests of all normative requirements in a specification in order to move a W3C Web specification from a candidate recommendation to an official recommendation. These tests are used to ensure that at least two browsers fully support each normative statement. As you might imagine, creating all of these tests is daunting; HTML5 is expected to need well over 100,000 tests, to say nothing of CSS3 modules, WebApps, Media Extensions, etc. We have submitted thousands of test cases for HTML, CSS, and SVG that can be viewed at the W3C and the Internet Explorer Test Center, however more tests are still needed. These tests benefit all browsers – and ultimately the entire Web developer community – by ensuring a consistent, predictable behavior. As different browsers improve their same-markup support, we can all realize the promise of HTML5 and CSS3.

A few years ago, several members of the standards community turned to crowd-sourcing to help create new tests, this resulted in Test the Web Forward events.

With the sponsorship of major players like Microsoft, Adobe, Google, and Mozilla, the Web community has come together, running local test-writing sprints around the world—France, China, Australia, and the US. Each sprint not only generates hundreds of tests, but also engages with and educates Web developers about the specifications that make up the Web platform.

Inside the Seattle Event

Our friends at Adobe were instrumental in setting up a successful event, building upon their experience in running previous events. In Seattle we kicked off the hack-a-thon on Friday night, with inspirational and informative presentations from Mozilla's fantasai (Elika Etemad), Adobe's Rebecca Hauck, and Microsoft's Kris Krueger, explaining why we need tests, what type of tests are available, and how to create them. Here’s a quick outline:

Stand-alone tests typically rely on visual verification: if a failure condition occurs, red content will show.

Reference tests compare a test against a visual reference that has no dependency on the feature being tested. Note that the test includes a link to the reference test against which is should be compared. For example, if you wanted to test that DIVs render background colors correctly, you might make a ref test using TABLEs.

Object Model tests depend on a JavaScript test harness; they verify that the object model reflects what static style sheets specify. For instance, this CSS media query test.

These presentations were followed by 2-minute pitches from Saturday's session test leaders on why participants might want to pick a particular focus (CSS Flexbox, Pointer Events, CSS Transforms, CSS OM, Backgrounds & Borders, Exclusions, or HTML5), though session participants were free to write tests against any API or spec they felt passionate about.

Following breakfast the next morning, participants broke up into three rooms with session leaders helping out in each. Each area was staffed by experts (in addition to the speakers from the previous evening): Arron Eicholz (Microsoft, CSS); Jacob Rossi (Microsoft, Pointer Events); Sylvain Galineau (Adobe [formerly Microsoft], CSS); Alan Stearns (Adobe, CSS); Dave Methvin (President of jQuery, HTML).

The leaders instructed everyone on how to determine where tests were needed and how to create code that tested the specific assertion that we wanted to capture. Volunteers could either work on their own, work in small groups, or get 1:1 help with the experts.

When all was said and done, the sprint generated 514 submitted tests, just edging out the record set by the Paris test sprint and setting a new bar for upcoming sprints to beat. After a few celebratory drinks, the end of the night saw the raffling off of a Surface Pro which was won by a student volunteer who joined us from the University of Washington.

You Can Help Too!

In IE10, we have added support for a long list of new standard features across CSS, HTML, SVG and the DOM. We have published some of our test cases for these new features on our IE Test Center. We will be submitting more, but we still need help from the community to get the right tests written and move these specs forward.

We are excited to be part of the community working towards a more innovative and interoperable Web. We support several initiatives in this direction, like the recent donation of JavaScript documentation to Webplatform.org, or our continued efforts to simplify cross-browser testing with modern.ie. If you want to help move the Web forward, too, come and join us at one of the next Test the Web Forward events! In the meanwhile, you can learn how to contribute tests, or review existing tests online. To hear about upcoming events and to stay in touch with the rest of the Test the Web Forward community, please subscribe to our W3C mailing list: public-testtwf. If test writing sounds too intense, but you are still knowledgeable and passionate about the Web, you can get involved with the WebPlatform Docs project and help document the Web.

For more info and updates, follow our Internet Explorer developer relations handle on Twitter @IEDevChat, this initiative’s handle @testthewebfwd and in particular #testtwf.

We will keep you posted on upcoming events and we are looking forward to meeting you soon!

—John Jansen, Kris Krueger, Arron Eicholz, and Jacob Rossi – Internet Explorer

Minutes Telecon 2013-04-24

• Resolved: Publish WD of Selectors 4
• Discussed publishing Template Layout spec. Week to review.
• Discussed issue with flow-into.
• Need info from fonts people wrt use of font metrics for alphabetic underline position.
• Resolved: Change text decoration z-ordering back to match 2.1
• Resolved: Repeat fixed-positioned elements on all pages, including blank pages generated by forced page breaks. Tweak the definition of :blank to match.
• Case matching of fonts seems to be resolved, unless someone has concerns.
• Reviewed recent changes to CSS3 Box Alignment.

Full minutes

Interview: Demonstrating Web Apps at Mobile World Congress 2013

For Mobile World Congress 2013, W3C worked with several developers including Tomomi Imura (Nokia), Steren Giannini (Joshfire), and Dominique (Dom) Hazaël-Massieux (W3C) on two Web applications to demonstrate some of the new capabilities of HTML5 and related technology. I asked some of them about their experiences creating a camera app, a photo gallery app, and the server-side technology to stitch them together. The resulting demo worked as follows:

• The camera app takes pictures, displays them on the camera, and can post them to various sites, including W3C's own server.
• The W3C server receives the photos and publishes a feed that is updated as new photos arrive.
• The gallery app reads the feed and displays the photos useful on a variety of devices, in our case: smartphone, tablet, television, and laptop.

The camera project began in the Core Mobile Web (Coremob) Community Group as a way to illustrate both the current capabilities and limitations of the Open Web Platform (OWP).

Ian: Tomomi, when did this project start?

Tomomi: Originally, the app was nothing more than a prototype I wrote for fun. John Kneeland, from Nokia also wanted to work an app that would showcase the capabilities of the OWP. The Coremob CG seemed like the right venue, and we developed the specs in the fall of 2012, shortly before a Coremob face-to-face meeting.

Ian: The Open Web Platform intends to lower the cost of cross-device development (see the related interview with Todd Anglin on the Kendo UI survey). As you built the camera app, what did you find was relatively easy to make work across devices? What was difficult (and how did you solve it)?

Tomomi: Creating a user interface that is platform independent is one of the keys to cross-platform development. When I created the UI for the camera app, I designed it to be independent of the platform's look-and-feel, so a common CSS was all I needed. Non-trivial CSS works fine on all targeted smartphone browsers so I can say that designing the UI was the easiest part. Also, canvas works as expected on most browsers so I did not need extra workaround to support cross-platform.

However, to be honest, it was not as easy to make it cross-platform as I initially expected. A big reason is that the app was meant to showcase new features, which means it relies on new Web technologies that are in the early phases of standardization and not yet broadly interoperable. I found there was no browser that implemented correctly all the APIs I used in the app. In particular, I struggled to use IndexedDB to write photos to local storage. At the time I was coding, only Firefox and IE10 had implemented IndexedDB according to specification. Chrome 18 (was the released version at that time. Now, finally Chrome 25 is out of beta) supports basic IndexedDB, but was using an older version of the specification with no blob support for the database. I had to write extra code to make the demo work on Chrome.

Beside the workaround code, I used PhoneGap for Windows Phone 8 because IE10 for mobile lacks HTML Media Capture capability, although all other features worked fine. This is a hybrid app that, I think, is useful for illustrating how to work with HTML5 in a transitional mode where features not yet available on certain platforms.

Ian: What would you like to do next with the camera app? It's an open source project - are you looking for help from the community on specific aspects?

Tomomi: We have a bunch of things in the pipeline, notably writing tutorials on all aspects of building this app (like providing camera access using HTML media capture, storing pics in IndexedDB, etc.). We also have a nice table with all the key features required to build this app and how well (or poorly) they are supported in different browsers. I definitely want to share our experience in more detail with developers. Before doing that, I plan to simplify some of the code (to remove some hacks). This will cause more browser incompatibility, but my goal is not to promote hacks and tricks, but rather working with Web standards.

Ian: Steren, Joshfire volunteered to be part of this project because you already had a Web-based gallery app. What has been your experience so far (generally) getting your app to work across different devices? In particular, the app works on some televisions. What has been your experience so far with Web technology on televisions?

Steren: Joshfire is creating tools to build applications for today's devices and the ones coming tomorrow. For us, Web technologies are the logical solution to build a multi-device application that is sharing the same codebase on all these devices. The Web Gallery was developed under this model: 80% of the code is shared by all the versions of the app, and the remaining 20% is just for layout adaptation, view hierarchies, and user interactions.

Web technologies have been selected by TV manufacturers as the official tool to build applications for connected TV. That's a good thing and their browsers are now getting better. It was not the case in 2011, where some TV browsers had critical bugs and suffered from major performance issues. Today, it is more easy to develop for TV, I would say it is similar to mobile web development.

Ian: From your perspective, what are the priority features of the Open Web Platform where you think we need to make progress in order to close the gap with native platforms?

Steren: I think developers need features, frameworks and documentation that will help them to build rich client side applications more easily. And to close the gap with native platforms, they also need to be able to access device specific sensors and features (as enabled by projects like Phonegap). Native platforms have application ecosystems that are more than simple URLs: they ask permissions, install locally and auto-update in background. I think the Open Web Platform should provide the same mechanisms. An important priority is also to identify browser problems in the implementation of the specifications. Today, developers notice too many implementation differences that do not appear to be a priority for browser manufacturers.

Ian: Dom, you built the server that hosted the camera and the gallery apps. What were your priorities in building the server? What solutions did you adopt?

Dom: As in any other project, my priority was to do as little as needed. In this case, the server mostly had to act as a go-between for the camera and gallery apps, receiving pictures from the former to display with with the latter.

I chose to develop a node.js-based solution, since I was confident it would let me assemble the various pieces I needed easily; also, one of the features that we were likely to use, Server-Sent-Events, is much easier to implement in an asynchronous environment such as the one provided by node.js.

Ian: We set up this apps to run in a local environment (that is, not on the Web). If we wanted to make available a Web version of these apps, what would you have to change in the server configuration? How would you deal with security? Privacy? Flooding our server with photos?

Dom: There are two options for having the app run in an open environment:

1. Put some sort of access control in front of the upload feature, where only selected users would be allowed to upload pictures, or
2. Put some sort of moderation in place so that any picture would need to be validated before being pushed to the gallery.

The first approach would require some changes in the camera app and the server-side component. The second would require a new client-side component, and would also benefit from different kinds of Denial of Service attack protection (e.g., rate limiting the number of pictures that can be uploaded, using techniques to avoid robot-based submissions, etc.).

I would probably handle privacy issues at a different layer. We would need a policy and a process to determine when and how a given picture can be posted (e.g., asking the submitted to vouch they're not posting a picture of someone without their agreement), and how pictures could be taken down.

Ian: Thank you all for the insights, and good luck with the evolution of these apps!

CSS Grid Layout Overhaul

The CSS Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of CSS Grid Layout. This CSS module defines a two-dimensional grid-based layout system optimized for user interface design.

This is a major update: not only has the draft generally been reorganized and much of the prose rewritten to fill in missing details, avoid repetition, improve precision and terminology, and ensure alignment with Flexbox, but it’s switched to a new positioning model. The old grid layout model uses properties to indicate the starting row/column and the item’s span. The new grid layout model positions each edge of the item to a grid line.

There are tons of issues marked in the draft, such as:

• What to do by default with items that aren’t positioned?
• Best way to indicate that the contents of an element should align the parent grid?
• Better names for various properties?
• Better syntax for defining the size of the rows/columns?

We’re totally looking for feedback, particularly on syntax issues, so please send comments to the (archived) public mailing list www-style@w3.org with the spec code ([css-grid-layout]) and your comment topic in the subject line. (Alternatively, you can email one of the editors and ask them to forward your comment.)

Comments have also been enabled on the cross-post over at CSS3.info. We strongly encourage feedback and suggestions for improvement from the design community!

CSS Grid Layout Overhaul — Comments Needed!

The CSS Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of CSS Grid Layout. This CSS module defines a two-dimensional grid-based layout system optimized for user interface design. This is publication is a major update: not only has the draft generally been reorganized and much of the prose rewritten to fill in missing details, avoid [...]

CSS3 Values and Units Updated

The CSS Working Group has published an updated Candidate Recommendation of CSS Values and Units Level 3. This CSS3 module describes the common values and units that CSS properties accept and the syntax used for describing them in CSS property definitions.

This is publication mainly just incorporates some minor fixes and clarifications. It also defines the interaction of scrollbars and viewport units. Changes since the last publication are listed in the Changes section.

As always, please send feedback to the (archived) public mailing list www-style@w3.org with the spec code (>>[css3-values]<<) and your comment topic in the subject line. (Alternatively, you can email one of the editors and ask them to forward your comment.)

Minutes Telecon 2013-04-17

• Discussed Colors Level 4, particularly whether the proposed syntax extensions are a good idea given existing implementations, and whether color-correction is still needed.
• Resolved: Publish CSS Marquee as a NOTE with a note that says it is discontinued.
• Resolved: Scientific notations also allowed in percentages and dimensions.
• Resolved: Publish CSS3 UI as Last Call with added cursor values. Move nav-* properties to level 4. Contact Web and TV and Opera about nav-* changes. Ask for comments from WAI PF and SVG and any groups we asked for previous Last Call.
• Discussed importing ICC profiles and Lab color additions to SVG2 into CSS4 Color.

Full minutes

CSS Overflow Module Working Draft Published

The CSS Working Group has published a first public Working Draft of the CSS Overflow Module Level 3.

This module describes:

• the CSS ‘overflow’ property, as in previous levels of CSS,
• the new ‘overflow-x’ and ‘overflow-y’ properties and their interaction,
• (to be added here, but currently still in css-gcpm) a new feature that allows overflow to cause pagination
• a new feature that allows overflow to cause replication of the box, dividing the rendering of the element into fragments that can be styled separately.

This draft is still relatively early in development, but the group welcomes feedback on all aspects of the draft.

As always, please send feedback to the (archived) public mailing list www-style@w3.org with the spec code ([css-overflow-3]) and your comment topic in the subject line.

The CSS WG published the first Working Draft of CSS Overflow…

Minutes Telecon 2013-04-10

• Liam to add proposal for advanced line-breaking to CSS Text Level 4.
• Resolved: Cascading Variables moves to Last Call. Inform WebApps, SVG, HTML WGs.
• Resolved: Do not adopt MediaQueries-style invalidation for Selectors due to Web-compat concerns.
• Discussed allowing #123abc to be a valid ID selector, to match HTML5. Need to collect data on this.
• Resolved: :nth-child()/etc don’t require a parent: they’re based on siblings. This is a change from Selectors Level 3 REC.
• Resolved: Changed specificity of :matches() to the specificity of the actual matched selector.
• Resolved: Define a new selector that matches element that is either completely empty or contains only whitespace. Note: Need naming suggestions.
• Resolved: Accept the proposal to have two profiles of Selectors, with “fast” for CSS Selectors and “complete” for Selectors API.

Full minutes

Advanced cross-browser flexbox

The CSS Flexible box module level 3 brings with it a lot of power and some very exciting possibilities for web development, allowing us to put together complex site layouts easily and rapidly, and dispensing with some of the illogical hacks and kludges that we've traditionally used. In this article Chris Mills goes beyond the basics, showing some more interesting uses of flexbox, and how Modernizr can be employed to serve different styles to browsers with differing levels of flexbox support to provide the best level of cross browser support available.

CSS Conditional Rules Candidate Recommendation Published

The CSS Working Group has published a Candidate Recommendation (and call for implementations) of the CSS Conditional Rules Module Level 3. This module describes the @media and @supports rules and associated APIs. It extends CSS level 2 by allowing nesting of certain at-rules inside ‘@media’ and adding the ‘@supports’ rule for conditional processing.

The working group is interested in feedback from authors and implementations, contributions to the test suite, and feedback on the tests in the test suite.

Changes since the last Working Draft are listed in the Changes section.

As always, please send feedback to the (archived) public mailing list www-style@w3.org with the spec code ([css3-conditional]) and your comment topic in the subject line.

Minutes Telecon 2013-04-03

• Test the Web Forward Seattle April 12-13 (Fri-Sat)
• Test the Web Forward Tokyo planned for June 7-8 (Fri-Sat)
• Resolved: Publish CSS Overflow Level 3 as First Public Working Draft.
• Resolved: Exclusions model used for shape-inside.
• Resolved: Use the cascade for page size user prefs
• Discussed problems with using cascade for page-margin content.
• Resolved: Table cells, flex items, and grid items all form pseudo-stacking contexts. Update Flexbox, errata CSS2.1 accordingly.
• Discussed image-rendering, distinguishing between auto and smooth, perf considerations for animations.

Full minutes

The CSS WG published a Candidate Recommendation of CSS Condi…

New on modern.IE: Free VM Downloads, Windows 8 QuickStart Kits, Enhanced Code-Scanning Tools, and More

Today, we are updating modern.IE with enhanced tools and resources to help you test your sites for modern browsers like Internet Explorer 9 and 10, while also helping you support older versions of browsers. These enhancements address the most common feedback, suggestions, and requests that we have received from enthusiastic users since introducing the site in January.

With today’s update, we are making available a new offer, new downloads, and tool enhancements on modern.IE. Some highlights include:

• Order a Windows QuickStart Kit for Mac Developers, including Parallels Desktop 8 and Windows 8 on a USB stick shipped to you for a $25 donation to select charities  (Update 10:45am PDT 4/2/2013: The Windows Quickstart offer sold out quickly. Given how popular these were, we will look into making other offers available in the near future.)
• Download new virtual machines for IE10 on Windows 7 and IE8 on Windows XP
• Scan a Web page URL now identifies more interoperability issues, even for sites located behind a firewall.
• Availability in 18 languages

We continue to offer 3 months of free BrowserStack access so you can easily test across browsers and OS platforms without changing your primary development environment.

We are excited to see the developer reception to modern.IE so far. We appreciate the thoughtful feedback in tweets and suggestions you have offered on ways we can help save time and improve how you test your Web experiences. Today’s modern.IE release incorporates much of that feedback. Please do keep the comments coming, as we will continue to update the site regularly.

For the Mac user: Get the Windows QuickStart Kit including Windows 8 with Parallels Desktop 8

We heard that the most common way you test across browsers is through virtualization of browser and operating system combinations using your favorite virtualization platform, such as Hyper-V, VMWare, VirtualBox, or Parallels. However, costs to purchase software and licensing can be difficult if you’re that startup looking for your first big breakthrough.

Today we’re making it just a little easier with a new combo offer: We’ll ship you a copy of Windows 8 and Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac virtualization on a USB stick for a $25 donation to your favorite charity, courtesy of our friends at Swish.  (Update 10:45am PDT 4/2/2013: The Windows Quickstart offer sold out quickly. Given how popular these were, we will look into making other offers available in the near future.)

We only have a limited supply available. You can get the details and pre-order here.

Download new virtual machines

You told us that you want to be able to access as many testing environments as possible with minimal extra effort. Today we announce new virtual machines that are available for free:

• IE10 on Windows 7
• IE8 on Windows XP

We also received lots of feedback from developers on Mac and Linux concerning how to simplify your testing experience. We have added Parallels for Mac images for all IE versions. Many of you had some challenges downloading the VMs previously, and in response, we have updated the VM installation process to be simpler. Complete download information is available here.

Scan a Web page URL for common coding issues: Enhanced tools now also run behind a firewall

Based on your feedback and experience, we have enhanced the scan a Web page URL tool to provide more flexibility and to offer more detailed and actionable guidance. Over the past two months, you have scanned hundreds of thousands of URLs – from top sites like Facebook, Pandora, and Yahoo! to the local pizza store near you. We have studied the most common coding issues reported on these sites and looked at which issues resulted in fixes or enhancements to the site. We also received hundreds of new ideas directly from the community. The result was a set of new enhancements that make the scanner a more complete testing solution for your site:

• Scan your Web pages behind a firewall: The most common feedback we heard is that today, so many sites include authentication, are internal or commercial line-of-business Web apps, or are otherwise not available to the public Internet. Now, you can install a local instance of modern.IE to scan your code while keeping your project secure from others (including Microsoft). Install it through node.js and access your site via localhost.
• Deeper scan for common IE compatibility issues: We heard from you that the first step when testing for IE is knowing whether your site is on the Compatibility View list, but what you really want to know is how to fix the underlying compatibility issues. Now on modern.IE, you can scan your site using our Compat Inspector tool using browser automation, provided by Sauce Labs, without adding a single line of code to your site.  The result is a line-item list of suggested fixes.
• Breakpoint detection for responsively designed sites – We found that you were most interested in learning how to adapt your Web experiences to support the growing range of devices – from phones and tablets to the big screen IE on XBOX. About 20% of top traffic and influential sites now offer some form of mobile-optimized experience – a significant growth in the past year. The scan a Web page URL tool now has built-in logic to detect when a Web page has been optimized for the common horizontal screen resolutions (or “breakpoints”). While we recommend that you let your site’s content determine which breakpoints to build for, we do suggests the most common ones across a range of devices.
• Touch-optimization detection: As touch support evolves toward a Web standard, we also learned that sites currently implement touch support in a variety of ways. modern.IE now detects Touch functionality across multiple JavaScript-, HTML-, and CSS- based techniques.
• Browser plug-ins: Recently we announced that Internet Explorer 10 in Windows 8 and Windows RT have been updated to enable Flash content to run by default. If you want to check to see if your site is on the Flash CV block list, you can now scan for this on modern.IE.

We have also made dozens of bug fixes in the scanning tool to handle Web pages that used less common practices or frameworks & libraries. If you scanned a Web page and got an error, we encourage you to try it again!

modern.IE for the World-Wide Web

modern.IE will be available in 18 languages throughout the next two days, making it a bit easier for site developers around the world. The supported languages include Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, Chinese (Simplified, Traditional, and Hong Kong), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish (Spain and Latin America), Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

modern.IE – Testing made easier

We will continue to enhance modern.IE with your help. Please continue to share your feedback on this resource. Please continue to let us know what you like, and what we’re missing!

-- Sandeep Singhal, Group Program Manager, Internet Explorer

The CSS WG updated the Working Draft CSS Grid Layout

The Publication Standards Project is an advocacy group set u…

CSS Counter Styles Draft Updated

The CSS Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of CSS Counter Styles.

This spec documents the existing CSS 2.1 and 2.0 counter styles in better detail, adds a handful of CJK and other list styles, and adds an @counter-style rule which allows authors to define their own counter styles.

Significant changes since the last Working Draft are listed in the Changes section. Significant additions include:

• the width descriptor for, e.g. zero-filled counters
• the speak-as descriptor for customizing text-to-speech
• the disclosure-* styles, intended to be used for the HTML <details> element and similar use cases

We’d especially appreciate a review of these additions. We expect the next publication to be Last Call.

As always, please send feedback to the (archived) public mailing list www-style@w3.org with the spec code () and your comment topic in the subject line. (Alternatively, you can email one of the editors and ask them to forward your comment.)

CSS Custom Properties for Cascading Variables Draft Updated

The CSS Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of CSS Custom Properties for Cascading Variables.

The Variables spec defines a family of “custom” properties, whose names and values are completely author-defined. These properties provide values to “CSS variables”, a new type of value, which are substituted with the values they stand for, allowing authors to create more modular and maintainable style sheets by centralizing the definition of common values.

We’d appreciate people to review this draft carefully, as we expect to take it to Last Call soon. In particular, the section on the variables API is new, and we would appreciate feedback on it.

Significant changes are listed in the Changes section.

As always, please send feedback to the (archived) public mailing list www-style@w3.org with the spec code () and your comment topic in the subject line. (Alternatively, you can email one of the editors and ask them to forward your comment.)

Minutes Telecon 2013-03-27

• Update of CSS3 Overflow, needs review for First Public Working Draft publication next week.
• Resolved: Publish updated grid layout WD
• Recently-posted issues against CSS3 Text Decoration; need to file and address in Disposition of Comments.
• Resolved: We copy the behaviour of percentage margins/paddings from Grid to Flexbox: they are relative to their respective dimension, not always the inline dimension (as in block layout)
• Discussed problem of always loading style sheets even when qualifying Media Query does not match: see message 1, message 2.
• Resolved: Wrt propagating events up through regions parent chain (rather than DOM parent chain), propose solution based on using a property to switch behaviors.
• Discussed offsetParent and region parenting.
• Resolved: Publish new CR for CSS3 Values and Units with various clarifications.

Full minutes

Open Web Platform Weekly Summary - 2013-03-18 - 2013-03-24

This is our weekly Openweb Platform Summary from March 18, 2013 to March 24, 2013. You can read again the last week blog post. Your comments are helpful.

[CSS] Smooth Scrolling

Sometimes Web designers wish to be able to create a smooth scrolling effect when adjusting the scroll position of a page. Tab Atkins (and someone else at Google) is proposing to modify scrollTo and scrollBy functions in CSSOM View to take a third parameter: an optional "smooth" string. If omitted, the scroll is instant. Boris Bzarsky (Mozilla) is explaining the current behavior in Mozilla. Simon Pieters (Opera) is wondering if there should be way to control the time dependency of the scrolling.It could become also a good opportunity for users to have more control on it and deactivate it through user stylesheets. Read the full thread.

[CSS] :first-child without parent

CSS world is sometimes harsh. A :first-child can never match a root element because it has no parent element and so is not the child of any elements. Read the full thread. The issue comes with DocumentFragment what should happen in this case. Boris Bzarsky and Tab Atkins outlined some possibilities.

[CSS] Orientation of input type="range"

When using <input type="range">, it might be useful to have it vertical or horizontal. Jonathan Watt was working on its support inside Mozilla and asking if there should be a property inside CSS for it. It seems that a specific attribute orientation is an intermediate solution in the meantime.

[CSS] min-width and max-width as pseudo-classes

Do we need :min-width/:max-width pseudo-classes for CSS layouts? A blog post is explaining the issues related to Responsive Web design per elements and layout resizing when in a different context than the main document. This started a gigantic thread on CSS list with very interesting concrete cases.

[WebApps] Appcache, some use cases

Charles McCathieNeville (Yandex) has posted use cases related to appcache.

[HTML] video playlist

How would you implement the playlist in HTML?

[HTML] longdesc is back

If you have been living under a rock, you might not know, but longdesc attribute is in the process of being back in HTML5. Not yet done. There are still a few issues to solve before.

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