Video:What Is CSS 3?

Transcript:What Is CSS 3?

Hi, this is Dimitri LaBarge for About.com, and today we're going to talk about what is CSS 3.

What Is CSS?

Before we talk about CSS 3, let’s talk about CSS in general. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It’s a way to easily format and design your websites using different styles. A style can be just about anything - it can be telling your site to center an element, to bold it, to set margins and justification. This internet-wide specification sets universal guidelines for standards-compliant web browsers. From time to time, the specification is updated. In this case, we’re about to see the guidelines for CSS version 3.

What Does CSS 3 Do?

CSS3 is going to make HTML coding much more viable as a document formatting tool. Let’s talk about some of the updates. One major move forward is greatly increased flexibility when it comes to background images. You can have multiple background images and background layers, control over background positioning, background size and more.

Improvements to CSS 3

Another big improvement - one that takes HTML much closer into the realm of print design - is control over columns. You’ll now be able to directly control the number of columns, their width, rule formatting, gaps, breaks, column span and more.There’s much more in CSS 3. CSS3 will let you use opacity within color definitions. You can define cursors, headers, footers, footnotes - this should make it much easier to approximate the look and feel of print media with simple style calls.

CSS 3 Template

Template functions now will be directly supported with a CSS template module, which should help developers code more efficiently. CSS 3 also adds some powerful selectors for conditional style execution. For instance, you could define a style that looks for an attribute whose beginning matches the word "frank" exactly. Keep in mind that the language and code is subject to change.

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