One of my most desired CSS features is coming to a browser near you — Robert O’Callahan has checked a patch into Mozilla that implements the three-year-old CSS3 multi-columns working draft.

For those unfamiliar with the module, it allows for the creation of multi-column layouts that dynamically re-flow. So you can have one div filled with text, specified to split into four columns at 100% height — no JavaScript needed. (IHT.com has a DHTML example of this behaviour in its articles.)

Will this make all the column-based layouts developed over the past two-and-a-half years redundant? No, but it does give Web designers a tool for improving the layout of text on a page (for example, newspaper- and magazine-style layouts are easier with multi-columns). This is especially true Opera and Safari also begin supporting it (via adot’s notblog).