Invitation to a W3C CSS Meetup in Paris
W3C and La Cantine invite the Web community of Paris (France) to the third W3C Meetup at La Cantine. The theme this time is CSS. The event will be held the evening of February 8, with participation of several members of the CSS working group. There will be presentations & demos in both English and French. Discussions can be in both languages; Daniel Glazman will translate between the two.
The program includes presentations by Daniel Glazman (Disruptive Innovations, co-chair of the CSS WG), Vincent Hardy (Adobe) and David Baron (Mozilla). Entrance is free, but registration is required.
The address of La Cantine is 151 rue Montmartre, 75002 Paris, between the metro stops Grands Boulevards (lines 8 & 9) and Bourse (line 3). The time on Wednesday February 8 is from 19:00 to 21:00.
Minutes and Resolutions Telecon 2011-01-18
- Deferring republication of CSS3 Writing Modes until jdaggett’s concerns are resolved
- Resolved: Breaks are allowed wherever there was a breakpoint, even if it was collapsed away. Clarify in CSS3 Text.
- Discussed problematic behavior of the
currentColor keyword, which computes on the element specified and then inherits, instead of inheriting as a keyword and then recomputing on each element. This is okay for non-inheriting properties like border-color, but doesn’t work for properties that inherit, like text-emphasis-color. (It effectively defaults the property to the color of the root element.) Tab to investigate whether SVG depends on this behavior or if we can change it.
Full minutes
CSS3 Images: Last Call Working Draft
The CSS WG has published a Last Call Working Draft of the CSS3 Image Values and Replaced Content. This module covers:
Note that replaced elements in CSS includes not just bitmap images, but also SVG (external or embedded), video, applets, plugins, and other “foreign” objects.
There have been significant changes to gradients over the past year.
If you have comments on any part of the draft, please, send them to the (archived) www-style@w3.org mailing list. Start a new thread for each issue, and include [css3-images] in the subject line. This will help us track your comments. (And please, if you can’t/won’t post to www-style, email the editors instead of posting randomly into the ether.)
We welcome editorial suggestions, additional examples, diagrams, or anything else that will help to make the spec more understandable.
The official deadline for comments is 7 February 2012. Let us know if you need an extension so that we don’t miss your comments.
Minutes and Resolutions Telecon 2012-01-11
- Resolved: Draft script/no-script detection for Media Queries 4.
- Resolved: Publish CSS3 Text updated Working Draft.
- Discussed switching to Mercurial (from CVS) for editing specs.
- Resolved: Publish LC of CSS3 UI with 4 weeks comment period.
Full minutes
Minutes and Resolutions 2011-01-04
- Resolved: Move the second f2f this year to Hamburg, same dates as before.
- Resolved: Publish Image Values as Last Call Working Draft. Comment period ends on Feb 7th.
- Resolved: Publish a new WD of Lists, and a FPWD of Counter Styles.
- Resolved: Make the changes to
text-overflow:ellipsis outlined in Tantek’s email
- Resolved: Don’t allow
!important in animations rules – it’s a syntax error.
- Resolved: Allow user
!important rules to override animations (exact location of animations in the cascade level still undetermined)
- Resolved: Define the override level of specificity somewhere, and decide where animations go in relation to it.
Full minutes
CSS3 Images Pre-Last Call WD Published
Tab Atkins and I published an updated Working Draft of CSS Image Values and Replaced Content Level 3 this month. We anticipate that this will be the last draft before Last Call, which we aim to publish in January. If you have an interest in this draft, please review it and send in your comments.
Changes to Gradients
Below is a summary of the major changes to CSS gradients over the past year:
- Angles in
linear-gradient() changed from polar angles to bearing angles (compass directions). 0° now points up (bottom-to-top), and angles increase clockwise. See Angles in Gradients for the feedback that informed this decision.
- Keyword directions in
linear-gradient() changed from bare directional keywords (top, right, bottom, left) indicating the starting point to to <keywords> where the keyword indicates the endpoint. (to bottom, to left, to bottom, to left). This change was made because Tab felt having 0deg mean bottom-to-top made the fact that top meant top-to-bottom confusing. The WG was split but mostly ambivalent on whether this was necessary, or whether from <keyword> was a better alternative; the resolution landed on to <keyword>.
- Corner-to-corner
linear-gradient() has been redefined so that instead of aligning the gradient line to the diagonal, the central color occupies the other diagonal. See Behnam Esfabad’s post for a demonstration showing the old and new (“magic”) versions.
- Syntax of
radial-gradient() has been changed to (roughly) radial-gradient( [ <shape> || <size> ] [ at <position> ]?, <color-stop> [ , <color-stop> ]+): specifically, the shape/size and position parameters are collapsed into the first argument using CSS property value conventions, allowing either or both to be specified. Position is distinguished from size by the preceding at keyword. See Radial Gradient Readability for some of the thinking that went into this change.
Other Features
Although CSS gradients are undoubtedly the most anticipated feature in CSS3 Images, there are a number of other features in this draft:
- Media Fragments can be used to clip out part of an image and use it in CSS. The new
image() notation, which can be used in place of url(), allows authors to trigger CSS parser fallback in older UAs when using media fragments.
- The
image() notation allows specifying a list of fallback images in various formats and allows annotating images with left-to-right or right-to-left directionality so that they flip automatically to match the element’s directionality.
- The
object-fit property allows preserving the aspect ratio of an image when assigning its box a specified size. In conjunction with the min/max-width/height properties, it also allows scaling the image and its box up to a given maximum, or down to a given minimum. The object-position property allows repositioning the image within its content box using background-positioning sytax when object-fit causes the aspect ratio of the image and the content box to mismatch.
- The
image-resolution property allows for using bitmap resolutions other than 1 image pixel == 1 CSS px unit.
Send Feedback!
As always, send feedback to www-style with the spec code ([css3-images]) and your comment topic in the subject line. While posting to www-style is preferred, I’ve also cross-posted to CSS3.info, and we’ll be scanning the comments there for issues, too.
Minutes and Resolutions Telecon 2011-12-14
- Resolved: indicate in CSS3 Text that “full-size-kana may be replaced by a generic text-transform mechanism” as an issue.
- Resolved: Move other features proposed in fantasai’s mail to L4
appearance property dropped from CSS3 UI
- Grammar error in CSS2.1 to be fixed:
- Resolved: Move ideographic advance unit to Level 4 of CSS Values and Units since we don’t have a definition for how to calculate it.
- Tab and fantasai to review all functional notation in CSS to evaluate extensibility and syntactic consistency and recommend any necessary changes.
- Discussed whether to drop
pointer-events or how to keep it without destabilizing CSS3 UI
- Discussed publication of CSS3 Exclusions and Shapes FPWD and the fact that certain high-level design concerns were not noted in the draft.
- Resolved: Update CSS3 Exclusions and Shapes spec prose to discuss issues raised by dbaron.
Full minutes
Updated CSS Layout Modules: Flexbox, Template, Regions, GCPM
Last week the CSSWG published updates to four layout-related CSS specs:
- CSS Flexbox (
[css3-flexbox])
- This module defines a linear layout mechanism similar to ordinary block layout, but specialized for applications and modern pages instead of documents. Children of a flexbox can lay out in any direction, “flex” to fill up available space in either dimension, and even be completely visually reordered among their siblings. The changes since the previous draft include the reintroduction of a multi-line mode, a substantial syntax change to the ‘flex-flow’ property (previously called ‘flex-direction’), and the start of a reworking of the layout algorithm. Additionally, many small fixes and clarifications have gone into the new draft. Design-level feedback is welcome!
- CSS Template (
[css3-layout])
- The module defines a mechanism to define one or more invisible grids, called “templates,” and then position the elements of a document into named slots in that grid. This allows elements to be placed in a visual order independent of their source order (as with absolute positioning) while still allowing them to be aligned to each other automatically. The changes since the previous draft include a
chains property to combine multiple slots in a template into a single one, in order to create areas with complex and disjoint shapes; and a larger number of properties that apply to slots: the style of a slot in turn influences the style of the elements placed inside it (region-based styling).
- CSS Regions (
[css3-regions])
- The module defines ways to (1) assign style to “regions” of the canvas, (2) create complex shaped regions out of multiple regions, and (3) position content into them. Various things might be used as regions, e.g., columns in a multi-column element or slots in a template/grid. The changes since the previous draft are noted in the document.
- CSS GCPM (
[css3-gcpm])
- The module defines a number of features used often, but not exclusively, in print and other paged media: running headers and footers, leaders, cross references, footnotes, page floats, etc. Some of the features previously in this module have been moved to other modules: hyphenation to CSS3 Text; counters to CSS3 Lists. Other changes include ways to horizontally align leaders and a new feature to switch from scrolling overflow to paging it.
Template Layout relates closely to Grid Layout, Flexbox, and Regions; however, these high-level layout modules have yet to be fully integrated.
As always, send feedback to www-style with the spec code ([css3-flexbox], [css3-regions], [css3-layout], or [css3-gcpm]) and your comment topic in the subject line.
Minutes and Resolutions Telecon 2011-12-07
- UTR50 review period closes in January. If you have feedback on the default orientation of characters in vertical layout, make sure you review it and send comments by then.
- Resolved: Column-spanning elements can only span when the closest ancestor BFC is established by the multicol element.
- Resolved: Each column-spanning element establishes a separate BFC (option C); margins between them collapse.
- Resolved: Glenn and Shane co-edit CSOM and CSSOM View.
- Resolved: Florian and Sylvain become coeditors of Media Queries.
- fantasai to check in update to the CSSWG’s Current Work Page.
Full minutes
Minutes and Resolutions Telecon 2011-11-30
- Reviewed state of CSS3 Speech LC comments and progress toward CR.
- New draft of JLREQ has been published. Apparently no diffs are available at this time.
- Resolved:
radial-gradient( [ <shape> || <size> ]? [at <position> ]?, ... )
- Resolved: Publish new WD of CSS3 Images
- Resolved: Split predefined counter styles from CSS3 Lists into a separate spec.
Full minutes
![[Photo: group photo of the CSS working group in Lyon, France]](/web/20120215141607im_/http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/csswg-2010.jpg)
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