is CSS4 real and happening?

Just adding to what Chris Upjohn said,

There's a cycle when it comes to programming. There are:

1) People who are extremely good at learning the newest technologies really fast, and get products out the door with that new technology for large sums of money. This technology may fail, may be a success, etc. - Doesn't matter, as those developers target market is those who want the most bleeding-edge technology.

2) People who continue to support extremely old technologies for varying degrees of reasons, mostly because they're tried-and-true and you have the comfort of stability - and because it makes the programmers a lot of money also.

Both of these people make a LOT of money doing what they're doing. Worrying about what technology to learn isn't really that big of a deal, and in fact, if your customers are businesses there's a good chance they DONT want the next bleeding-edge technology, they want a technology that's going to last for 10+ years, that's able to be maintained, and has the lowest degradation costs they can get.

I cannot comment on Web Development specifically, as I'm new to the field - however, when it comes to enterprise-level development this is particularly true. I've worked at major companies who still use COBOL and RPG II with IBM Mainframes, they have a host of 70+ year old men writing the same code they wrote in their 30s, and they're getting paid salaries double, or even triple that of the average web developers salary.

So don't worry about it, chances are by the time CSS4 comes out - you'll have enough knowledge in CSS3 that it will be an easy transition. Additionally, considering that it's just a version upgrade to the same technology - there's a good chance that 90% of what you learned from CSS3 will apply to CSS4.

Hi Chris,

CSS4 is still only in it's early days, it will be quite a few years before we see it actually being used as the CSS3 specification isn't final yet. I'd be willing to say it will start showing up in browsers around 2018-19 depending on how W3C go with getting CSS3 final and done as a recommendation spec.