Adding CSS3 Support To IE 6, 7 and 8 With CSS3 Pie 142
rsk writes "Internet Explorer 6, 7 and to some extent 8 have been the bane of every CSS-loving web developer for years. With the spreading adoption of CSS3's fancier rendering effects, like rounded edges, drop shadows and linear gradients, the frustration of needing to deal with IE compatibility is growing. 327 Creative's Jason Johnston has created the CSS3 Pie library to address this. CSS3 Pie adds support for CSS3's most popular rendering techniques to Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 by way of the IE-only CSS property 'behavior.' CSS3 Pie is open sourced under the Apache 2 license and can be accessed from its github repository."
Re:IE? Seriously? (Score:3, Informative)
As for IE, some people would just rather not have to deal with third party crap. However, IE6? There really is no reason to run that anymore. Won't IE7 or 8 run on Windows 98?
No, IE7 and IE8 aren't supported on 98, ME or even 2000, XP and newer only.
Re:Pointless. (Score:5, Informative)
If you were intelligent enough to know how to install CSS3 Pie*, you wouldn't even use IE.
*not exactly "install" per se seeing as it's a library, not an application but you know what I mean. Hopefully.
You seem to have misunderstood what this is about... The end-user doesn't install anything. The .htc resides on the server and it's the developer who includes the library and makes it work.
To be fair, however, CSS3 Pie isn't something that you should actually use, considering that it slows down the browser massively and it just adds the ability to display useless visual cruft.
This library, on the other hand, is several orders of magnitude more useful (and I'm dead serious about it): http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/ [google.com]
Forget CSS3, work on CSS2 (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of CSS2 features don't even work correctly in IE6 and IE7: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_(Cascading_Style_Sheets) [wikipedia.org]
A lot of the really useful selectors, for instance, aren't available in IE6. Not to mention min-width/max-width, and white-space:pre. And using left and right in the same rule makes IE6/IE7 ignore right. In IE6/IE7, there's plenty that goes unimplemented, like :active and :before and outline and display:table; and border-style:dotted; and vertical-align:middle; and background-position:fixed;.
These aren't obscure features no one uses, these are all features I've wanted to use while designing my webpages that are supported by every other browser that IE6 and IE7 don't support.
We should really be looking to fix those, first.
Re:CSS (Score:3, Informative)
One of the key points of CSS is the ability to override/disable styles on the client side.
You want that site in plain text? Turn off CSS altogether. Instead of embedding fonts tags, italics, background images and so on in the HTML, it's all removed to the CSS file. Makes the HTML more useful as raw information. Makes it easier to make seepintg changes to the layout of a whole site (change one shared CSS file and voila!) and allows users to override the sites style and layout anyway they choose.
CSS makes it easier to get at the raw information and makes it easier to manage the style and layout of entire websites. If IE played nicely with the spec, then I'd be happy as pie.
Very Cool..... but laggy (Score:2, Informative)
Launched IE-8 on my laptop for the first time in months and pointed it at the site's homepage.
While it displays fine, you can feel the lag when scrolling/resizing the window. I cannot imagine what it would be like on an older machine running IE-6.
That said.... the library is unique, inventive, and solves a serious issue with cross-browser compatibility... kudos for thinking outside the box!
Re:Almost never make it a priority in development (Score:5, Informative)
You can read the internal memos [justice.gov] they discovered during the trial yourself, where the phrase "embrace, extend, extinguish" originates. Claiming they didn't intentionally break compliance, when they say they are planning to do so in their own e-mails requires absurd bias on your part.
Re:Almost never make it a priority in development (Score:2, Informative)
True. I recall being asked to develop a "multimedia product with interactive, animated instructional material that can be centrally updated". IE4 was THE BEST solution and it really was quite the revolution in browsers at the time. IE4 rocked everyone's socks off. After IE6, however, it was clear everyone else was moving in a different direction and IE just didn't seem interested - or maybe thought they could still win. So instead of making life better, as IE4 did, they doggedly made life worse.
But the W3C is also guilty of being closed-minded and making life difficult for us devs. While saying "don't use tables for layout", they failed to provide alternatives - vertical centering, dynamic % height, ie. stuff that tables did very well. And still no real separation of layout and content. Using
is layout, not content. Having to nest several DIVs to make something work is layout, not content. So why are tables any different? W3C seems to think the web is only for one thing: mass media distribution. Sorry, no it's not. It's also for writing very specific applications for very specific uses and audiences. We need the tools to do both efficiently.
Facebook's slowness in addressing simple web-standard accessibility issues didn't slow down its growth. Not saying that's right, just saying not every web site in the world is there for the same reason or needs to adhere to every single standard. If you don't never complain or do anything different from the crowd, nothing ever changes.
Disclosure: I still think IE's box model made more sense. :)
Re:Almost never make it a priority in development (Score:2, Informative)
Nice goalpost move. Why not stick to what you originally said, that they "went to court and lost over intentionally plotting to break compatibility with both published standards and other browsers"
The fact is, that's not true. The court of appeals specifically said that the justice department did not prove their case regarding browser tying, much less what you are claiming.
Further, the phrase "embrace, extend, extinguish" goes back much further than this case, so you are again incorrect. And the argument was about compatibility with Java, a closed technology (at the time) owned entirely by Sun. It was not a standard.
The link you reference does not support your claim, and in fact the only reference to "standards" in there is that Microsoft wanted to influence and control them, not deliberately violate them.
I'd say the bias is yours, since nothing you've said about this is, in fact, true. As in, you know, supported by fact.