Inayaili de Leon writes in Smashing Magazine that we should start using CSS3 features. The article’s been reposted lots of places, including MetaFilter. I think my attitude can be best summarized by this MeFi comment from “rokusan”:
Any amateur web developer’s response: Cooooooooool!
Any professional web developer’s response: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Later.
I mean, hell, I’d love to use column-count, but even de Leon concedes its biggest flaw:
Browsers that don’t support these properties render the content as simple text, as if there were no columns.
Those browsers amount to about 70% of the market. Try to imagine a site that wouldn’t look horrible if you pinned its layout to column-count and then fired up IE7, the browser currently holding about a 50% share.
The biggest exception, of course, is border-radius, the key to image-free rounded corners. To quote de Leon:
Currently, it is probably the most widely used CSS3 property for the simple reason that rounded corners are just nice to have and aren’t critical to design or usability.
Indeed, I’ve used it here – and by that, I mean, “I’ve used it here, all over the place.” I’d never do so at work, not when 70% of our users are on IE, but this site has a target audience not known for its love nor extensive use of IE. Besides, IE users just get chunky, square corners, which is not a big lose.
Still, I look forward to the day when IE9 (which, fingers crossed, will have decent CSS3 support) has a large enough share. Rounded corners are something that visual designers just love love love, and drawing them with images is both clunky and a waste of bandwidth. I can’t tell you what a delight it was coding up the CSS for this site, since I’m used to the confines of image-based corners and the associated hacks.
Posted in Browsers, CSS |
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I have basically decided that if you can live with (any version of) IE, square corners are unlikely to be a problem for you.