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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The latest nightly releases of what will become Firefox 4 have implemented a couple of experimental new CSS features. The –moz-calc function allows calculations on length values, and the :-moz-any selector permits grouping of simple selectors.
If you have a nightly build of Firefox you can see a little demo I’ve put together of them in action.
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Sitepoint’s Web Design blog featured an article this week called Create A Studio Style Backdrop In Photoshop, which provides instructions for making a glossy, reflective surface effect, similar to what you often see in adverts.
As the title makes clear, the tutorial is for creating the effect in Photoshop — but really, the same effect is fairly easily achievable with some bleeding-edge CSS. That said, it won’t work in every browser, so currently it’s just a proof-of-concept piece.
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Last month the W3C released a working draft of the File API, which defines the basic representations for files, lists of files, errors raised by access to files, and programmatic ways to read files
. The Firefox team have already implemented much of it, and have released a series of impressive demos on hacks.mozilla.org, which you can see if you have a recent beta of Firefox 3.6 (or a nightly trunk build).
The four demos shown to date display different (although related) aspects of the API, showing first multiple file uploads, then a drag and drop upload interface, next adding progress information (although this doesn’t work for me), then reading EXIF data from a JPEG image. You can imagine how these combined would be used for native drag and drop uploading to Flickr, for example.
The File API plays a big part in integrating the browser more tightly with the OS, particularly when combined with the drag and drop functionality, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until the other browsers implement this. Congratulations to the Firefox team for their work on this, and hacks.mozilla.org for some great demos.
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.
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The latest alpha release of Firefox 3.6 (3.6a1) contains some new rules for providing backgrounds to elements: multiple background images, background-size, and an implementation of the Webkit gradient proposal (modified from the original — more on that later).
I’ve put together a very rough demo of what you can do with these new rules; you’ll require a recent build of Firefox 3.6 or Webkit to view it. Try resizing the window to different dimensions, and see how it changes.
Here’s an explanation of how I did it:
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