All-New Border Fun — An entire alien fleet has called off its long-planned invasion of Earth because it heard that CSS3 is implementing the border-radius expression to finally give us rounded borders. Additionally, we’ll be able to use gradients (as well as a box shadow effect that doesn’t require some potentially messy CSS tricks) and graphics for our boxes and borders.
Boxes, Boxes, Boxes! — you know you want to re-size elements. You’ve probably already done it, in a hacky/ backdoor kind of way. But resize will be fully legal, moral, vertical, horizontal, and also be able to specify max-width to keep the layout intact. On a less-controversial note, box-sizing will let you specify whether the stated size of a box will include the border and padding, or have the border and padding added to it.
Speaking of boxes, wouldn’t you love to have a one-step multi-column layout? I knew you would. just define column-width and column-count (and put something between them with column-gap and column-rule (the latter inserts a solid line between the columns, the former a nice white space as wide as you like).
Blending into the Background — how about being able to specify if you want your background to go all the way to the edge of the border, to the padding, or only the content area? For even more control, you’ll use background-size to set the image to a percentage of the box. And if you’re just hopelessly indecisive, how about multiple background images on any single element?
The Colors, Children, the Colors! – okay, so RGB and hex colors give you gazillions of possible colors. CSS3 doesn’t think that’s enough; in fact, HSL (hue, saturation, and lightness) colors will be implemented, as well as OPACITY (I’m yelling because it’s so important). Both RGB and HSL will get an additional letter (A for Alpha, because RGBO and HSLO just don’t sound as good).
Everybody Loves Text Effects — except me. I’ve always found them gimmicky and tacky. However, even I can see the potential for a nice little drop shadow here and there, or even more creative effects by the 0.0001% of users with taste and creativity.
Miscellaneous (AKA Boring but Very Useful) — such as word-wrap, a Microsoft contribution (no, really!) which breaks long words to fit into the box provided. Trust me, it will change the way you think about everything forever. So will Media Queries, which will allow you to deliver the same content with different stylesheets, each optimized for different views (i.e., web vs. mobile, or even for varying screen resolutions).