CSS3 is for everyone

I’ve been hearing this quite a bit from fellow web designers across the globe: “I can’t wait to use CSS3 … when it’s done.”

But the truth is everyone can begin using CSS3 right now. And fortunately you don’t have to think differently or make drastic changes to the way you craft websites in order to do so. How can anyone use CSS3 on any project? Because we’re going to carefully choose the situations where we apply CSS3, focusing squarely on the experience layer.

Targeting the experience layer

If we’ve been doing things right over the past several years, we’ve been building upon a foundation of web standards (semantic HTML and CSS for layout, type, color, etc.), leaving much of the interaction effects—animation, feedback, and movement—to technologies like Flash and JavaScript. With CSS3 properties being slowly, but steadily introduced in forward-thinking browsers, we can start to shift some of that experience layer to our stylesheets.