I’ve started to read your article some quite time ago, but per my own immersion into a pile of work that we developers normally take on, happily ;) went to bookmark it with this very nice Firefox feature that allows me to save group of tags here :D. I’m JP and work as a remote outsourced business IT consultant.

I wanted to share my own thoughts based on my UI experiences lately with customers vs the latest cutting edge technologies, the reason of not only using CSS3, but as well to migrate to “code” in HTML5 (I’m an advocate of HTML5 on this) + it’s research on the web as needed some reference about these topics and found myself today reading each of the postings. Is very nice to see that we all agree that IE stands for “I”mbecile “E”ngine.

Here is an interesting image that allows me to think that well is obvious IE is as shown on these charts widely used, but there is one thing we are all missing here, except for one of your followers who post I working on those using images for rounded corners (This is a good approach)

Oh, ok so the thing we are all missing is that we should not assume a surfer uses IE only for everything or that uses 1 device only. A surfer can be your next shopper so you need to treat your visitors (who you might not know in person, but that can get to know you and your company through your website) with respect. People visiting your site can be let down if someone at his/her workplace can find your website but on his Apple iPhone is not rendering properly for example, later on during the day.

So here is the image from Wikipedia about the market share evaluation and reported by Countries

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Countries_by_most_used_web_browser.png

I believe this is quite interesting, several sources have told me that Internet Explorer 7 has 4% market share within the Internet Explorer realm of usage worldwide. Why is this any interesting? Well, the fact that someone decides not to support an specific browser because of compatibility issues is indeed funny because there are so many ways to approach these issues on a case by case basis.

But don’t be fooled by these images, I might use Internet Explorer for something, but I use Google Chrome for my mail and Firefox for development for example, you need to think that your code is widely understood by the navigation application of the surfer’s choice and what is doing at the moment that found your website.

The truth is to move to code on HTML5 and the supported technologies, devices (mobiles) and styling elements such as: CSS3 for not only the browser applications but mobile devices as well is actually marking a serious transition that we all shall consider to expand.

It is well known fact that IE6 (and people that were able to code for the Microsoft’s unsupported child) is unlikely to be seen (except for one computer that I abandoned / refused to use at my home town which still uses IE6 because no-one decided to update it :P) nowadays, a developer must “work hard” to make it possible, but to migrate to use HTML5 and CSS3 will be the standard for placement of the good source of cash plus the fact that you are constantly annoyed already by Microsoft OS telling you to update your browser so is unlikely that using IE constantly you aren’t going to upgrade to the latest version of it which drives me to the point of this article: Internet Explorer 9 which seems to support CSS3 with no issues.

Most problems happen not for this reason only, and it’s not strange that most of the jobs that are recently opening in Fortune 500 and on organizations are either to port a language of programming to another to support browser and mobile technologies “clean user experience” and are willing to invest money there.

Keeping yourself sharp on these matters, can only be beneficial. I’ve heard that XHTML will be unsupported soon while it’s going to happen some more time before HTML5 is widely accepted, (and potentially supported) as well will mean the defeat (financially) of companies that provide CMS that are echoing to the browser code that won’t be able to reach a top decision maker that is willing to purchase your services on his PALM.

Don’t Panic, this only translate for more work! :) Big money spenders on IT are relaxed, or young clever people because they invest on the latest cutting edge technologies, and wear “the gadgets”

I think that a developer should do what he think is appropriate depending on the project and how it can save him and the client lastly lots of time working on it because of the reliability of the solution presented.

Ok, the good stuff :) These two links and to thank Lee for sharing his perspective and interesting opinion about this topic.

-1) jQuery Library Modernizer:
http://www.modernizr.com/
(JP:Not tested by me, yet but worth the try :P ) It does not do any magic, simply detects and attempt to create the CSS base to mimic the behavior, at least is what I understood. 1) Detects the browser to see if it has Javascript enabled 2) Render classes on the document that can be targetted with CSS3 properties like text-shadow, etc.

-2)
ie7-js
A JavaScript library to make MSIE behave like a standards-compliant browser.

http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/
(JP: Downloaded it, reviewed the js code and related files and looks like a solution that can help addressing some of the issues mentioned on this post)

-3)
Do your homework and spice out your content with jQuery and other technologies!

The libraries at jQueryUI.com (which are very lightweight) are fully customizable with the Theme Roller which you can select and download. Most of these use images and sprites for rounded corners, so you can add modal and dialog windows, use slider tabs, etc using this framework, if you haven’t tried… Trust me, it totally worth the reading in complement with this article. http://jqueryui.com/demos/

And look for jQuery browser function on http://jquery.com which allows you to construct a browser navigation detection and trigger events seamlessly. For example you can customize a page with basic CSS(1-2) or images for rounded corners and depending on the jQuery function detection to apply a class to the file and having it originally hidden (display:none or visibility:hidden either) with jQuery you can render it smoothly with a time out fading effect… well that was an example but the benefits are endless ;)

All the best and keep posting good stuff!

JP-

There’s lots of awesome CSS code in here.

I’m using your techniques on my new site that I will hopefully launch soon, because my current one sucks!

Thanks!

Mike C.
San Diego, CA

I don’t really care though for the generel use of rounded corners, they are just nice visual effects, and it shouldn’t ruin a design if only visible as hard corners (fallback). But it gets harder with the more advanced things like transform and multiple background-images and border-images.

Then users of IE<9 will miss quite a bit of the nice things, and the web designer has to decide, if this is good or bad. I guess this will mean, that the more advanced things will not be used for a long time, and that is sad.