HTML5 and CSS 3 have been around for a good while now, and more and more of it can be used on client work, although we’re not yet at the stage where we can throw off the strict doctype completely and create extravagant sites using canvas and SVG and all the other css goodness around such as animations and transforms. We can use smatterings of this stuff, border-radius, box-shadow can easily be used now, although in general they’re used for the extra touches on websites and elements that won’t affect the main design or critical elements of the page.
There are a few ways to add in CSS support for unsupported browsers using JavaScript but nothing that really offers a one stop simple solution for achieving decent CSS 3 support cross browser, and one service which was recently announced was eCSStender, which promised that by downloading and including a couple of JavaScript files that a wide range of CSS 3 techniques could be implemented cross-browser, crucially without any vendor prefixes required.
Recently, I was working on a project which would have benefited from this library as development time would have been drastically reduced with the benefit of cross browser compatibility for techniques such as border-radius, box-shadow etc and I began coding with this in mind.
There was initial success with Firefox recognising the standard border-radius without the need for the -moz- prefix, and this appeared to work cross-browser. Except for Internet Explorer, any version. After many attempts at trying to get this to work, I gave up.I recently heard that border-radius was not supported in IE with eCSStender, and I’m wondering what all the hype was in the A List Apart article. It was billed as a simple solution to easily achieve CSS 3 compatibility, but if something as simple as border-radius doesn’t work in IE then what’s the point? There are other ways of achieving compatibility and eCSStender was not all it was made out to be in the article.
It was billed as the saviour to vendor prefixes and greater flexibility, whereas in reality it is none of these.
