New methods of design are being conceived everyday and as an Arizona web design company, we have the privilege of figuring out how and when to use them. Sadly CSS3 is not completely usable across all browsers and won’t be for some time but we can still allow those that use web standard compliant browsers a taste of good design. Here are a few techniques that can be utilized currently in our web design practice.
Border Radius (about time!)
The Border Radius property allows the web designer to easily utilize rounder corners in design elements, without the need of corner images or the use of multiple div tags. This allows for less code and faster load times of websites.
Box Shadow and Text Shadow
The CSS3 backgrounds and borders module has a nice new feature called box-shadow. This command allows for multiple shadows to be utilized. The property has 3 lengths and and a color for it’s attributes.
Border Image
The new CSS3 property border-image is a little tricky, but it can allow you to create flexible boxes with custom borders (or drop shadows, if that’s your thing) with a single div and a single image.
These are just a few, two other mentions are the @font-face property (though not new to CSS3) and RGBa and transparency, both very lucrative assets to any web-designers pallet.
Modern browsers are stepping up to the web standard compliance of CSS3 and as I stated, within 2 years, CSS3 will be the norm for all web design without having to use long java-script code to get the design accomplished.
Obviously Internet Explorer (as usual) is unable to render any of these CSS3 property’s but as web designers, we do have some work a rounds. The fact is that Internet Explorer and our beloved Microsoft have always been on the back end of standard compliance and still seem to be trailing the competition. Gives us Web Designers a headache.
Update. IE9 will (so they say) have CSS3 support, which is now in beta but we will still have to wait for the web community to upgrade when it is finally released. A real quick point… Since January of 2010 IE has dropped by 5.5% in customer usage – and continues. Perhaps the headache known as Internet Explorer that has plagued our web designers for so long will finally be somewhat less worrisome.
