Slightly ajar

We at Opera like to give props to the competition when they're doing a good job, and one example of this is the work going on around CSS3. David Hyatt Has just announced that the latest nightlies of WebKit (The rendering engine built into Mac OS X and what Safari is based on), supports CSS3 multi-column. They now join Gecko (Mozilla) in support for this standard.

Hopefully it won't be too long before web designers can start using multi column layouts in their designs, without resorting to JavaScript hacks and extra markup. I predict that once this is possible it will be misused for a while. multi column layouts work great in print, such as newspapers and magazines, as they are a page based medium. On screen, if used in correctly, one will have to scroll to the bottom of the web page to read the first column, scroll all the way to the top for the next column, and scroll down again. To work well, designers will have to keep the columns vertically short enough to fit on one screen, and then break at the last column, to start the next set of columns below the fold.

Anyway, great work guys, and lets look forward to the next part of CSS3 to be implemented. As for Opera support, well I can't mention anything, but we have some nice selector stuff coming up in internal builds. A great site for learning about CSS3 and testing support is CSS3.info run by WebKit committer Joost de Valk and Peter Gasston.