Advantage of CSS3 over CSS

CSS3 is the latest version of CSS. It holds many advantages over its predecessor. CSS3 started to gain popularity in early 2010. At that time, some of the browsers did not even use to support CSS3 and so it took a while for the web developer community to start implementing this in their projects. Here, we will see the advantages of CSS3 over CSS, and also discuss why CSS3 gained such huge popularity in a short amount of time.

• Responsiveness: CSS3 inherently supports responsive design, and is equipped to handle media queries. Media queries help in making a website responsive as we can apply personalized CSS properties for different screen widths. Thus, the website looks good in every device it is accessed from.
• Colors: New color formats like RGBA(Red, Green, Blue, Alpha), HSL(Hue, Saturation, Lightness), HSLA(Hue, Saturation, Lightness, Alpha) were added. It helps the web designers as it helps them in applying styling and different color effects into their pages. The gradient and opacity properties were also added.
• Reduced the Alignment Problems: The box-sizing has fixed some annoying alignment problems as now the developers can give appropriate size to the divisions using properties like padding, margin, etc. It helps in creating complex web page structures. The CSS grid helps in creating responsive web pages without using the table rows and columns. Thus, the alignment problems were solved and making the websites mobile friendly became easier.
• Animations: CSS requires the developer to create animation using a scripting language. On the other hand, CSS3 introduced animation features like text-shadow. It reduced the workload of the developers as applying such animations were difficult earlier but with the introduction of these new CSS properties, it becomes much easier.
• Compatibility: As already discussed earlier, at the time of its release, CSS3 was not supported by many browsers and thus it took a while for the developers to use to get a hold of this. But nowadays, every modern browser supports CSS3 and that’s the reason why every website that is built nowadays uses CSS3 instead of vanilla CSS.
• JavaScript Independence Faster Loading: As already discussed above, earlier the developers had to mix JavaScript and CSS to provide even simple decorations like text-shadow, etc. With the introduction of CSS3, the dependence of CSS on JS got reduced, as a result of which, the loading time of the web pages decreased.
• Testing: Earlier versions of CSS were a bit complex when it came to the testing part. However, CSS3 has been divided into smaller modules which makes it easier for the user to run compatibility tests and test the parts individually. Therefore, bug detection becomes easier and it saves a lot of time and energy for the hassle.
• Platform Friendly: CSS3 is compatible with all the platforms or devices like mobile phones, tablets, etc.
• Border Radius: The border-radius CSS property helps in making the borders of the images and the div elements rounded in shape, an effect that required a lot of formatting and photoshop work to achieve before. Another biggie is its support of rounded image corners. Other properties like shadowing have also been added.

Thus, these were the reasons behind the sudden growth the popularity of CSS3, and the advantages that CSS3 holds over CSS.