In the first part of this post I gave a potted history of the differing syntaxes, and provided an overview of how that affected linear gradients. In this second part I’m going to look at radial gradients.
Here the syntaxes diverge slightly more, with WebKit requiring more values than Mozilla; while that adds some flexibility, it also increases the complexity.
CSS Gradients were originally proposed by the WebKit team in April 2008, modified from the syntax proposed for the Canvas element of HTML5. In August of this year, Mozilla announced that an implementation slightly modified from that of WebKit would be in the next version of Firefox (3.6).
Since then, however, the CSS WG have discussed a different syntax, and a resolution was passed to add this to the Image Values module. Mozilla have decided to implement the new syntax, which is simpler than WebKit’s but less flexible.
In this article, which will be split into at least two parts, I’m going to compare the two syntaxes.
Mozilla’s Bespin is a code editor built using web technologies. It’s still in its infancy, but shows promise. A new release, Bespin Embedded, lets you use the basic editor functionality on your own websites, using just a couple of lines of Javascript. If you don’t want to download it yourself, I’ve got a working demo. The editor doesn’t really do much at the moment, so this is really only a proof of concept.
With the rapid growth of the mobile web, location-aware services are very much in-demand; the GeoLocation API was proposed to cater to this need.
Implementation is spotty at the moment; Firefox 3.5 supports it, as does Safari for iPhone (although not on the desktop, AFAICS). But it’s so simple to use, I’ve no doubt it will be adopted rapidly.
Usually when I attend @media (that is, on two previous occasions) I write a follow-up blog post on what I saw there. Well I attended this year, and I’ve written the post, but it’s on the blog of my employer, Preloaded: HTML5, Mobile, and UCD: what we saw at @media.
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