Thomas,
I am curious to pick the brains of some of you CSS gurus out there about
something. Without going into too much detail, are there facets of CSS
that
are coming down the pipe in the not so distant future that "excite" you?
Although your question might at first seem somewhat "theoretical", I
believe that it has a practical impact because the answers should help us
to design sites today, using CSS, that will immediately take advantage of
new developments as soon as they arrive (and as soon as browsers start to
support them).
Some Web technologies have turned out to be dead ends (e.g. WAP; the
@page and @font rules in CSS2; and possibly certain CSS3 modules). By
contrast, other technologies will really take off. Regarding the latter,
my own belief is that mobile browsing will grow hugely in importance, as
devices get more powerful and as their browsers improve. Therefore, my
current designs are as fluid as I can make them: I am ditching table
layouts in favour of positioning/floats and I am starting to use CSS3
Media Queries [1] to achieve additional fluidity for handhelds.
Positioned/floated layouts are already well understood (at least, by css-d
subscribers). I suspect that such layouts are more amenable to small
screen adaptation than are table layouts (where the only possibility is to
linearise the cells). CSS3 Media Queries are hardly used at present but
they will be an enormous aid to adapting content for small screens. Only
Opera supports this CSS3 module (since 7.20) but it can safely be used
*now*, since other browsers will simply ignore its rules until they, too
implement support. Firefox is probably not too far away. Bear in mind that
many handhelds use Opera as their browser and that more will do so, since
that is Opera's main market.
The other exciting technology is CSS3 Speech, since an aural browser, with
voice input as well, is the only real way (in my view) to overcome the
physical limitations of handheld devices (keyboard and screen). But this
is a long way off (5-10 years?) since memory and processor power on
handhelds are (presumably) the current limiting factors.
[1] <http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=FluidDesign>
--
Jim Wilkinson
Cardiff, Wales UK
Opera e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/
______________________________________________________________________
css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d
List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/
Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
