Five by Five

Rounded corners are the bane of a web develope’s existance, a seemingly innocent splash of design flair responsible for countless tears and tantrums. It seems laughable that such a group of hotshot professionals would be phased by something as simple as rounded corners, but there’s an undeniable truth belying this source of heartache - the web is made from boxes - big, ugly, right-angled boxes and softening up the corners requires a disproportionately large amount of time and effort for your average lazy developer, not to mention the internal demons that developers have to wrestle with as divitis, extraneous images and javascript hacks creep their infectious way in to otherwise perfect Web pages.

Thankfully help is at hand courtesy of the W3C, an organisation of egg-heads responsible for standarising the Web. The specification for the next version of CSS, the de-facto choice for styling webpages, includes a module outlining a wonderful new property known as ‘border-radius’, to keep things simple I won’t go in to the details, suffice to say that this one-liner will magically soften the hard edges of the Web and wow us all with it’s possibilities.

Of course nothing ever goes to plan quite how it should, and as the W3C drag their heels over ratifying this new specification the browser vendors have taken it upon themselves to introduce their own mechanisms for creating rounded corners using CSS, and of course in the spirit of competition each do it differently (or not at all, Microsoft I’m looking at you). The end result is that we’ve gone from having no easy way to create rounded corners to having three different ways which means that for maximum rounding value all three ways must be implemented.

This shocking echo back to the browser wars of the nineties is an excellent example of why it’s important to have Web standards and browser vendors to implement them, if only to avoid the games of oneupmanship that the browser vendors played in the past. Unfortunately the huge scale of the CSS 3 specification and the glacial pace at which the W3C moves means that the threat of another browser war within our lifetimes is very real.

Tags: browsers, Rumble, web standards

This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 5:11 pm and is filed under Front Page Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.