Poll Results: CSS3 Features

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Chris Coyier on (Updated on )

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Almost 7,000 people have weighed in on this poll so far, making it the biggest yet! The question was:

If CSS2 and CSS3 was fully supported in all browsers tomorrow, what would you be MOST excited about?

As always, very interesting results. It was EXTREMELY close for first place, going back and forth a number of times between the three top contenders.

  • #1) Border Radius (22.0%, 1,541 Votes) – This is the attribute in the most widespread use already, through the mozilla and webkit browser extensions. Clearly a huge desire for designers. Still no signs of support in IE.
  • #2) Multiple Backgrounds (22.0%, 1,523 Votes) – This is what I voted for! This is going to make some cool things possible with very little markup. The backward compatibility of it is rough though, so this one will be a while.
  • #3) @font-face (21.0%, 1,424 Votes) – With the new Firefox soon to be supporting this, as well as Safari, Opera, and even IE (!), this is going to start seeing some serious widespread use very soon. The legal implications of what we can and can’t use are the problem now.
  • #4) Animations / Transitions (12.0%, 818 Votes) – WebKit is leading the pack here, with some pretty stunning possibilities. Clearly, animations are part of design, and belong in the stylesheet. These can be applied in a progressive enhancement fashion, so as soon as they move beyond only WebKit I think we’ll start seeing more of it.
  • #5) Gradients (8.0%, 535 Votes) – Defining solid color backgrounds is trivial, but as soon as a gradient is needed, images usually get involved. Yet, gradients are mathematically defined and a perfect candidate for defining with code. WebKit is first to the fray here, and the results are pretty great.
  • #6) Box Shadow (4.0%, 271 Votes) – Drop shadows are forms of gradients that also typically require the use of images. These can be even more complex than typical gradients as they need to fade in different directions, often requiring use of lots of extra markup and images. Box shadow makes adding drop shadows to elements trivially easy.
  • #7) RGBa (3.0%, 234 Votes) – The “a” part of RGBa stands for “alpha”, as in, transparency. Being able to declare a color with transparency without having to effect all child elements is fantastic for designers. This is seeing widespread support, except for IE of course.
  • #8) Text Shadow (2.0%, 140 Votes) – Gradients again, only applied behind the vector shapes that make up web text. This isn’t even possible with images, so this will bring design possibilities for web text that simply haven’t been possible before.
  • #9) Other (2.0%, 168 Votes) – Do share!

I have a new poll idea cooked up, which I’ll put out later this week.