With CSS3, users will be able to resize specific elements on your pages, through the use of the “resize: ” property. The example below make a class of <div> called “resize” that the user will be able to scale.

div.resize {
border: 1px #00000 solid;
height: 100px;
overflow: auto;
resize: both;
width: 100px;
}

The “resize: ” property can be set to “horizontal”, “vertical” or in this case “both”, depending on which way you want the element to be resizeable. Note the “overflow: ” property set to auto, so that scrollbars will appear if the user resizes the element to a smaller size than the content needs. You can set the “overflow: ” property to hidden to clip any content in the middle.

You can also use the “resize: ” the property, in combination with “min-height: “, “max-height: “, “min-width: ” and “max-width: ” to constrain how the element can be resized.

I can only find support for this in Safari 3 so far, but I’m sure support for Firefox and others is round the corner. it’s worth noting that Safari has had resize support for <textarea> elements enabled by default for a while. Although useful (undersized <textarea> elements are a pain), it’s worth restricting the maximum height and width so as to not let users completely destroy your interfaces.

The upcoming CSS3 will see support for more complex colour values, including an alpha value. Using CSS2, a semi-transparent background has been a bit of a problem. You had the option of using a semi-transparent PNG image but this isn’t supported by IE6 without some Javascript modification. Alternatively, you could create a <div> tag, and set the opacity and filter (IE) properties to make it semi-transparent. The problem here is that the opacity is inherited so the contents of your <div> tag are faded as well. See our workaround here.

However, in CSS3, we can simply declare a <div> tag like this.

<div style="background: rgb(99, 00, 00, 0.8);"></div>

to create a div with a semi-transparent dark-red background. Any content inside the <div> tag would be rendered using full opacity. Problem solved. RGBA colours are already supported in Safari 3 and Firefox 3, which also support an alpha value for the HSL colours that they support.

The first PHP 5.3 release candidate hit the mirrors today. Here’s a quick rundown of the main features of this release:

Namespaces – As your PHP scripts grow larger and more complex, it can be difficult to keep track of which variables you’re using. This is worsened if you’re using additional libraries and scripts from other sources that you didn’t write yourself. PHP’s new namespaces aim to alleviate the problem by allowing you to group your variables into categories. No more hours spent trying to find which bit of code is overwriting your variables.

Late Static Binding – Here’s the problem, how do create a class that accesses method / properties that haven’t been initialised yet. Admittedly, a tough one without the use of late static bindings. Creating a class, you can access the properties and methods in that class using the self:: keyword. If you create a child that extends that class you can access the parent’s properties and methods using the parent:: keyword. But until now, you’ve been unable to access the child’s properties and methods from the parent class. This is because multiple children can be used to instantiate the parent. Late static bindings means that in addition to self:: and parent::, the static:: keyword now provides access to all parent and instantiating child properties / methods. Happy days!

Anonymous / Lambda Functions – graduates of Java and other object-orientated program will recognise this immediately. It’s the ability to create a function (for example, as a callback function), without having to give it a name. When a function requires a callback, rather than having to define a function and enter that name as the callback we can use the standard function() {} syntax to group a few statements together on-the-fly.

Native MySQL Library – the PHP team have written their own MySQL library for the 5.3 release. This new “native library” is under the same license terms as the PHP project, not MySQL AB’s license terms. This means MySQL support can now be bundled in the PHP by default. Being developed specifically to work with PHP has also lead to greater memory efficiency.

Phar – clean out your PHP directories and organise your applications that bit more by grouping them into Phars. Similar to Java’s Jar files, you can distribute entire apps in a compressed form. PHP will now recognise the phar::// URI scheme, so that you can include individual files from a Phar archive without extracting all the files.

Opacity has been the bug-bear for years of Web development. Is it now resolved? No. In fact, it’s getting worse. Firefox, Safari, Opera and any other browsers based around the WebKit or Gecko-rendering engine have supported the de facto CSS “opacity: ” property, taking a decimal value between 0 and 1 (1 being fully opaque).

However, Internet Explorer has stuck with it’s “filter: ” property, which invokes a DirectX filter that changes the opacity of an element. The “opacity: ” property is now a part of the CSS3 specification, and you would have thought Internet Explorer 8 would support it – it’s hardly difficult. IE8 does not support “opacity: ” and to frustrate you further, it’s new “standards mode” moves the “filter: ” property to “-ms-filter: “. Okay, so it’s best to move all these non-standard CSS declarations out of standards mode, but when you’re not replacing it with anything, you’re just creating further problems.

So in short, to ensure maximum compatibility from IE8 onwards, you should declare opacity three times:

opactity: 0.8;
filter: alpha(opacity=80);
-ms-filter: alpha(opacity=80);

Joy! What’s more, IE8 does not seem to support alpha values for colours in the form of RGBA or HSLA. Oh well, at least we got PNG transparency in IE7.