We spoke to Håkon Wium Lie, CTO, Opera and spoke about the latest trends in open web standards.

From what we understand, CSS3 is now being developed in a modular fashion, so parts of it can become standardised while other modules are still being worked on. What are some of the CSS3 modules that are near being recommended?

Yes, you're right, CSS3 is modular. And it's probably about somewhere between 20 to 30 modules. And we can't do all of them at the same time. Some are being actively developed by all browsers and they are the ones that are closest to being mature, whereas others are more experimental. Some of them may never really become a standard. So there's little bit of everything in it. I think it's due to the success of CSS that it has attracted all these people who wanted to do stuff. So they come and say yes I want to do something in CSS3. We make it easy for new people who want to get involved and create a new module. But we do not necessarily commit to implementing it. But I can show you some of the things that we have implemented in Opera, and that some of the other (almost all) browsers have implemented. For example, border radius in CSS3 is one of the more mature functions. This is something almost all browsers have now, which makes it possible to just say a simple one line code that you can have a rounded border. I was initially against this, and was one of the features suggested in CSS1. I personally thought this was old school and newer designs wouldn't prefer it. It reminded me of stuff done in the 1970s. But I discovered that many people actually want to have rounded borders and so we decided we would just do it. It's now possible to give variations to the visual impression. This was something web developers and designers would otherwise have to use images for. That's exactly what CSS is about. It's about replacing images. That's what we're trying to do. Another example, would be CSS transitions. Using CSS transitions, we can create simple animations, by, writing, again a few lines of code. This would otherwise take a lot of effort in JavaScript or Flash. This is much simpler to do and is also supported across the board. Besides, Flash wouldn't have worked on all devices anyway right? But these kind of things will work across all devices very soon.

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