Previews of implemented CSS3 functionality

Although still a work in progress, I hadn’t realised how many of the proposed CSS3 features actually already have some kind of basic implementation in the latest set of browsers. Check out this page which provides live demonstrations of some of the more exciting proposals.

I think the major things I’m looking forward to are…

• Ability to specify multiple background images on the same element – so no need to add superfluous elements as styling hooks
• Multi-column layout – allowing text from a single element to visually flow into multiple columns, much like a newspaper layout
• Decent support for RGBA – so being able to specify the alpha channel when setting a background colour. This avoids having to cut PNG images in order to achieve a semi-transparent background.
• Support for specifying colours in terms of Hue, Saturation and Lightness. Although I’m not quite sure how I’ll use this yet, I can imagine this would make animation of colours more intuitive – for example, using javascript to animate the amount of light applied to an element.

The live examples are really worth looking at, and give a much better feel for what is coming up compared with reading a specification.