The latest Gimp release has several new improvements that make it more comparable to Adobe Photoshop.

Gimpusers has a great summary of new features and enhancements with Gimp 2.4.

The UI is a little cleaner, and now uses the “Tango-style” icons present on most operating systems.

The selection tool has been cleaned up a bit.

Text-to-path has been improved, allowing for curved text and shaping.

Preview in plugins and filters has been improved to allow for panning and zooming.

Color picker has been changed to allow a spot-pick from anywhere on the screen (not just the current image in Gimp).

Today, the W3C announced CSS 2.1 as a “candidate recommendation”.

W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of “Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2.1″ to Candidate Recommendation. Implementation feedback is welcome through 20 December. CSS is one of the Web’s most widely implemented languages. By separating the presentation of style from the content of documents, CSS simplifies Web authoring and site maintenance. CSS 2.1 is derived from and is intended to replace CSS Level 2. A snapshot of usage, the specification brings the language in line with implementations, fixes errata and adds a few highly requested features including the inline-block value for the display property, the color orange and the values pre-wrap and pre-line for the white-space property. Visit the CSS home page. — W3C

For those who are unfamiliar with CSS it is a basic set of design rules that can control the “look and feel” or design of a web page. When used properly, CSS can radically simplify front-end markup, removing all “design aspects” such as position and coloring from the HTML markup itself.

Some of the benefits are a smaller page size and easier redesigns. Today’s web developer and designer should have CSS experience on their resume.

More info can be found at the spec and the CSS explanation.

Of course there are “excuses” for inline CSS style declarations…that’s why we have them.

Are they misused? Of course.

HTML emails need to be constructed with inline styles…for those who have never tried….but alas, that is not why we have ‘em.

We have them to override those “special one-off” cases that do not require a global definition.

Use the “DRY Principle — Don’t Repeat Yourself”

1. If you need an inline style, use it.
2. If you re-use it on that page only, put it in the local stylesheet.
3. If you use it on multiple pages, refactor it into your global css file.

There was no mention of “specificity” — which may be considered part of the cascade.

/* generalized style -- less specific */
ul { background-color: green; font-weight: bold; }

/* overrides more general styles -- but also inherits */
ul#nav.special { background-color: red; }