Alex.
I like the point you have made. However I may different in the interpretation. I There are things that you CANT do w/o CSS3, or that are TOO cumbersome to do w/o CSS3, or thinkif you are going to use fall backs, you might as well stick to CSS2. I think that the error liens in the belief that a site should appear the same in ALL browsers. this is flawed logic for two main reasons.
if that was possible… why bother having updated versions of browsers in the first place ( aside for the love of counting )? There is no way to display a graphic in Mosaic, for example.
Despite being a graphic designer. I understand that on the web CONTENT is king. If you style sheet degrades in a consistent , and graceful manner YOU HAVE SUCCEEDED. If your goal is fr the site to achieve the same UI and presentation in every browser you have set yourself up to fail.
That’s true, but there are certain aspects of HTML5 and CSS3 that you can safely use even with older browsers that don’t understand them. The browsers will still make a passable attempt at rendering them, even if they don’t know what they are (eg new inputs included HTML5), or can’t do all aspects of the styling (eg rounded corners in CSS3). That isn’t to say that a page written fully in HTML5 and using extensive CSS3 will be fully functional in older browsers, but you can use some of the new features.
Mind if I ask who qualifies as “most”? Even IE6 has some level of CSS3 support (granted it’s very limited but does have some), in regards to browsers in general… 46.24% of web visitors (accounting for every browser cept IE which supports CSS3 and HTML5) will naturally be able to get the benefits from them, and then there’s the further IE users who have scripting enabled (where a htc file, script or jQuery itself which supports much of that kind of thing) will replicate the behaviour. The amount of people who can’t use it in some form is less than probably 4% and of those, a gracefully degrading site will still give them a decent experience.
PS: If you examine mobile web browsers, it’s close to 85% of natural support for HTML5 and CSS3.
I don’t see how your thoughts differ from mine dresden, I have simply stated that you can use technologies as long as they have a safe fall-back mechanism
I prefer HTML 4. I have yet to build anything in HTML 5. HTML5 isn’t worth the compatibility headaches and uncertainties. Especially not worth using a whole bunch of JavaScript hacks to get it work consistently. Considering the spec isn’t even finished I think its pretty unprofessional to use it in production environments. For experimental and personal I think its fine but if someone is paying me money to build a site I’m going to use something that I know will work well into the future without issue or dependency on JavaScript.
Sigh Someone doesn’t understand progressive enhancement! You can make a website as fancy as you like, you CAN use CSS3, you CAN use Flash… what you NEED to-do however is ensure that older browsers can still use and participate in the experience if certain features are unavailable. This means using fall-back mechanisms. It is (for example) entirely possible to use CSS3 box-shadow’s on an element but still have it work right the way back to early versions of IE as when box-shadow is unavailable you can have a border in place so there’s still something around the edges to indicate the enhancement (but not have it not work at all). Proclaiming we need to go back to “web 1.0” is both unnecessary and irrational, I use CSS3 in my site, and it works fine in IE6.
And be aware that there are still lots of users using old browsers.
For example at the company where I work, the IT department gives everyone IE6 as standard browser. You can’t update by yourself or choose to use FF if you want, because as employee, you don’t have the rights to modify this or install other stuff. All stuff is locked by profiles modified by the IT dept.
So there will always, ALWAYS be people with old browsers looking to new sites that won’t render the way it should be.
Think about 2nd and 3rd world countries where people use old computers, old browsers etc… lots of visitors wachting your new site the wrong way.
Or is it the webdesigner making it too fancy? It’s who’s fault?
The only solution is to make old fashioned web 1.0 websites that can be viewed in almost every browser.
No. On the other hand, there are some things that you can use as a progressive enhancement that will work on supporting browsers and gracefully degrade on others. I’m thinking of some of the things like form input attributes, eg required and type. You can use these quite happily now, because old or bad browsers will just ignore the HTML5 code and treat it as a normal input. It’s then up to you whether you put a back-end input validator on or just accept that some people might complete the form incorrectly.
I tend to agree and I’ve been wondering the same thing. It seems there are a lot of blog posts and articles about different things you can do in html 5 and css 3 but it doesn’t make sense to them when most web visitors won’t benefit from them.
