An urgent call to action on vendor prefixes

Prompted by the announcement on 37Signals that their next platform update would not support IE7 or IE8 (or many other older browsers), a vigorous debate took place on Twitter around the subject of for how long we should support browsers which don’t have the most modern features. For all its many positives, Twitter is no place for nuanced argument, so this article is for me to try to frame my opinion a little better.

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CSS pre-processors like Sass and LESS extend CSS in many useful ways, not least by allowing you to use variables in your code either as single values or blocks of multiple property/value pairs, called Mixins. So useful are these that developer Tab Atkins proposed to the W3C that they be adopted into CSS itself, but they were rejected as no suitable use cases were seen.

I think I’ve found a scenario in which, while the use of Mixins aren’t vital, they’re certainly very useful, and it’s because of one of the core principles of coding: DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself).

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The latest Working Draft of the CSS3 Image Values and Replaced Content module was released last month, and contains some changes to the gradient syntaxes — for what you’d hope would be the last time. The updated syntaxes are a little more logical, but offer the same flexibility.

Firefox 10, which is due for release in a few weeks, will see an implementation of the updated linear-gradient and repeating-linear-gradient functions, so in this article I’ll take a look at those, and write a follow-up when the radial gradient updates are available for use.

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One more post about things I’ve written elsewhere, then I’ll be back to writing original content here again…

Another pair of articles by me got published today; they’re both introduction-level:

Adventures In The Third Dimension, on Smashing Magazine, is a beginners guide to CSS 3D Transforms, explaining the syntax with a few demos; and for Ubelly I wrote The Five-Minute Guide to CSS Animations, which does the same job for CSS Animations.

I’ve an article coming up for .net Magazine soon; it’s called 10 CSS Techniques for 2012, it’ll be the cover article, and I’m very excited about as I wrote it in collaboration with Andreas Johansson, Harry Roberts, Lea Verou, Nicolas Gallagher, and Paul Adam Davis, all of whom do great work.

After that I have two more articles to write, should be tech editing a book on CSS3, then probably starting work on my own second book. 2012 is going to be a very busy year.

I think it’s been a really exciting year for our industry; the explosion of web browsing away from the desktop, HTML5 beginning to prove itself as the best option for cross-platform development, the newly-resurgent Microsoft making good browsers again… if you make your living from building the web you can’t fail to be heartened by this flourish of new life. There’s been a great appetite for discovery of new browser features, with lots of demos being made using cutting-edge and experimental CSS, HTML and JavaScript, so the curious amongst us have had plenty to satisfy us.

Part of my contribution to tutsplus.com’s experts(!) review of 2011.

I’ve been writing some articles for different websites in the latter half of this year, and it strikes me that I haven’t done a very good job of promoting them on here. So please allow me to correct that, with this brief rundown in reverse chronological order.

I’ve put together my list of the 20 Best CSS Sites of 2011 for .net Magazine. Choosing only 20 turned out to be really difficult, as I wanted to get a broad range of approaches. I’m sure there are plenty I missed out, including any that aren’t in the English language.

For The Sass Way I wrote about How Sass Can Shape The Future of CSS, showing how many of the features contained in the pre-processed CSS extension are under discussion for inclusion in future versions of CSS.

Webdesigntuts+ interviewed me about my book and my opinions on CSS3, including what I’m excited about for the future, and things to beware of when using cutting-edge properties.

And again for .net Magazine I discussed The Future of CSS Layouts, a subject I’m really excited about at the moment, which led to an article that was very popular with .net’s readership.

I currently have two more articles waiting for technical review and proofreading, which I hope will see the light of day shortly, and have promised to write another two as soon as I get time (as well as one for a dead tree publication). I’m very happy to be writing about my craft, and appreciate feedback or further requests for articles from other sources — although, I won’t be able to write quite as much next year as I’m planning to start my second book.