New background rules in Firefox 3.6

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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Firefox 3.6 has become the latest browser to support the CSS3 background-size property (although the first to do so according to the latest W3C spec.).

There’s so much great stuff written about web standards available for free on the web that it’s easy to forget how much bad stuff is also out there; and how many people are willing to support it just because it’s easier than putting in a little extra effort to follow best practice.
Over the weekend one of […]

The uncanny valley is a term from the world of robotics, which states that when something appears almost perfect, it can cause a negative reaction*. Or, to be more precise: “The uncanny valley hypothesis holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers.”

Firefox 3.5 was released earlier today, and joins Safari in supporting the @font-face rule with OpenType and TrueType font families, allowing you to use a wider range of fonts in your designs (as long as they are correctly licensed, of course).

One slight drawback of the technique is the blank space that’s displayed as the new font is loaded into the browser; this is especially unnecessary for users who already have that font natively on their system.

With (standards-compliant) browser innovation firmly back on the agenda, there’s a lot of exciting new technology to get to grips with. This week, Google have thrown their weight firmly behind HTML5, while a new start-up aims to bring web fonts to all.

I’m at home with the flu at the moment, so taking the opportunity to un-star some items in Google Reader; this post is a link-dump with a little added comment.

A few of them have been in my favourites for a couple of months, so apologies if you’ve seen them already.