Last week was Web Directions USA in Atlanta, GA. Real World CSS3 for Designers was the title of the first pre-conference workshop given by an Rubin on CSS3. Of all the sessions throughout the conference I enjoyed this one the most due to the detailed knowledge Dan Rubin shared about CSS3, and the fact that we had all day to drill into CSS3 and periphery topics. Below are links and resources shared throughout the session. I still haven’t yet had time to go though all of them in depth, and will undoubtedly have more to post after I do, but these need to be posted before they get stale.

What was covered:

  • Advanced selectors and browser support
  • Rounded corners (and how to design for when they aren’t there)
  • CSS3 Gradients (and an easy way to create them)
  • Text Shadow and Box Shadow (using them to your advantage)
  • Bitmaps vs CSS (when to use each and how to choose)
  • CSS Transitions (and their potential downsides)
  • CSS Animations (and how they compare with Javascript alternatives)
  • Browser-specific CSS (aka vendor extensions)
  • The future of CSS (experiments and anything which lacks support)

CSS Contents and Compatability
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/contents.html

CSS Examples


Recommended Reading

Ethan Marcotte’s article – Responsive Design
Doug Bowman’s – Making the Absolute Relative

Tools

CSS Effects to Explore
box-shadow
corner-radius
transforms
:before and :after psedo-classes can do cool things

Also…
Apparently IE9 (beta) is good. Who would have guessed?
http://lostworldsfairs.com
http://beautyoftheweb.com

The biggest take away for me at the end of the day was a sense of where I should be focusing my effort and attention when deciding to implement any of the CSS3 recommendation. I haven’t had the time to experiment much with it yet, so this really help to catch me up.