The Good News
Cascading style sheets have come a long way in helping both designers and developers make attractive and fast websites. While at SXSW this year, I sat in on a panel discussion between reps from Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera. Their discussion was based on how their browsers will be implementing CSS3 in the near future, starting with Firefox’s version 3.1 (which is currently in beta). The panelists showed demonstrations of what we will be possible in CSS3. Just a few of the exciting new features are listed below.

• Rounded corners – no longer will we have to use images to create sleek looking action buttons.
• Drop shadow and opacity – hopefully this will be used wisely throughout the web, but this is another way we won’t have to create an image to get these effects.
• Drop shadow to text – an extremely powerful tool to any site, now we can style html text in ways we couldn’t before.
• Multi column layouts – want your website to look like the page of a magazine? With CSS3 you can with ease.
• Font upload/download – perhaps the most exciting change, CSS3 will allow a user to view a page in a font other than the 10 html fonts available to us now.

Many of the features above will go a long way in making the user experience on the web faster because we no longer will have to rely on large images to get the visual representation we need.

The Not So Good News
Implementation of CSS3 is likely going to be very slow. Firefox’s 3.1 will be the first browser to support CSS3 properties. However, Internet Explorer just finished the most comprehensive implementation of CSS2.1 and it sounded like they were a little behind in CSS3 implementation.

This means that developers will likely be using the ‘old’ way of design and implementation until all browsers fully support CSS3. In the meantime, the rollout of CSS3 features (however slow) is extremely exciting.