At the moment, there isn't full support and consistency across all current browsers for CSS2.1 which was adopted something like 5 or 6 years ago. That's why I find it difficult to get excited about CSS3.

That's subjective to what you consider "current browsers" and what you consider (X)HTML/CSS. I encounter tons of bugs myself though certainly no show-stoppers except for Internet Explorer up to and including 9.0 at this point though to an decreasing degree. Junk-heavy HTML and CSS/JavaScript frameworks tend to cause the vast majority of issues I've seen people encounter.

Opera does have an scrolling overflow element with a child left-positioned element bug. IE9 doesn't correctly handle importNode, Safari doesn't handle cursor hot-points correctly, Firefox is the worst at styling file input elements, etc. I certainly think we've been moving in a good direction at least in terms of rendering engines overall though.

- John

I stand by what I said and can't really get excited about CSS capability improvements in a minority browser like Opera.

Then why bother going to the Opera forum here and posting comments of indifference?

- John

I find it very worthwhile to pay attention to what Opera does - and not just because it's my main browser of choice.

Opera has lonh been HIGHLY influential in the upper echelons of the browser maker world, as well as the standards world. With names like Håkon Lie and Ian Hickson involved, other browser makers watch Opera closely and have often copied their innovations - many of which have been ground breaking.

Multi-columns with CSS is something that website authors have needed for years. This support from Opera is a very hopeful sign for me.

Sorry John, I arrived via the Latest Posts facility so I lost track of where I was for a while there and my comments were of a more general nature than is appropriate for the Opera Forum.

Having said that, I too yearn for Multi-Column CSS. It will be interesting to see how long it takes the Browser market to reliably implement this to a market penetration sufficient enough for designers to make the switch.

This is the type of enhancement where I can't exactly see graceful degradation working and I have a policy not to go into Browser Sniffing with custom CSS fixes.

Yes! Ted, I've noticed a lot of folks who have worked at both Opera and the W3C.

Piskie, I've have multi-column layout implemented in to my site for about three or four years now and I'm ready to implement them for Opera once we get the first alpha or beta build of 11.5. I use DOM object detection and serve a rendering engine based CSS3 style sheet to avoid errors in the console. In fact on Sunday I implemented CSS3 media queries which I set to keep too many columns from occurring at low resolutions which was very handy! Opera 10.5 made me very happy with things like transitions and with Firefox self-imploding with the removal of critical GUI components like the missing go button and status bar I may eventually switch to Opera especially now that it's gained support for extensions.

- John