Two years ago, I suggested how a rotation property would be a welcome introduction to CSS, allowing designers and developers to control their designs even further with an often used design pattern.

It seems I wasn’t alone in thinking of this and we are now getting very close to a fully supported solution.

Last year, the forward thinking WebKit guys implemented a new -webkit-transform property to their rendering engine. Among many things, this new property allowed for any element in a web document to be rotated using some very simply syntax:

#my_element {
  -webkit-transform: rotate(90deg);
}

This was all well and good but with support limited to WebKit browsers (like Safari and Omniweb), it had very limited appeal - it was more of a test bed for the future.

Only last month though, the Mozilla team released a nightly build which also supported the new transform property, also prepending their specialist prefix to it as -moz-transform which took the same values as -webkit-transform.

Mozilla also included a secondary property called -moz-transform-origin which allows you to control the point of origin (default is around the centre point).

By using the following code, you will have two of the most popular rendering engines covered when it comes to rotating:

#my_element {
  -webkit-transform: rotate(90deg);
  -moz-transform: rotate(90deg);
}

That’s Safari and Firefox now covered!

It’s obviously still too early to rely on these CSS properties for mass coverage but if you think along the lines of progressive enhancement - offering a richer experience to users of modern browsers while delivering basic functionality to those less fortunate - it is certainly something you can start playing with.

Twitter have done it with the rounded corners on their recent redesign and I’ve started sprucing up my redesign with several CSS 2.1 properties (check out the slightly rotated headings in the sidebar).

Generally speaking, this is a great move forward with the CSS specification. It’s unlikely to become a firm standard for many years yet but at least you can start sprucing up your designs by experimenting with the CSS Transform properties.

When hiring a web developer, it’s good to have a set of established questions to ask the candidate, not to catch them out, but to ascertain the level the candidate is working at.

We’ve all gone through the learning process (and still are in certain areas) so it is unfair to judge most answers as a negative response.

Rather than creating a list of closed questions where the candidate can only answer a right or wrong answer, I wanted to delve more into the candidate’s mindset, their motivation and experience, their experiences, their ambitions.

With this in mind, and a little help from some friends and peers on Twitter, I collated the following open questions.

1. Briefly tell us about yourself and your work history?
2. What do you know about [the company] and what is your opinion of our website?
3. Based on the role profile, which of your strengths best fit the requirements?
4. What’s your preferred development environment? (Windows, Mac, Linux)
5. What experience do you have (if any) with ASP.NET or PHP?
6. What do Web Standards mean to you?
7. When do you use a HTML table?
8. What are the benefits of using CSS?
9. Give some examples where you have used JavaScript.
10. If you have used any JavaScript libraries, which is your favourite and why?
11. Which PHP/ASP.NET frameworks have you used and which is your favourite?
12. What methods could you use to speed up the load time of a webpage?
13. How can you improve the accessibility of an online form?
14. Give some examples where Microformats are appropriate and where you have used them.
15. Explain the process you would go through to debug a webpage or web app.
16. (And finally…) What is it you like about being a web developer?

This is by no means a final list of questions but a starting block. You might think of other questions that are more appropriate to the role your company has created but I felt the above questions are at the level you come to expect from the modern web developer.

Feel free to contribute your own favourite questions to the comments below too.