First look at the CSS support in Internet Explorer 8

Internet Explorer 8 is released last week. The IE team promised the browser will be more standards aware, similar to it’s major competition Firefox, Opera and Safari.

The trouble is — designers and developers don’t settle for current minimum, we are always into something new. So, by the time a giant vendor locks the feature list, a more flexible and agile competition goes miles away.

In the era of rounded corners/borders and transparency made possible purely with CSS, IE team missed to implement both, or at least in the form that wouldn’t require separate style-sheets files to conform to W3C guidelines.

I checked a few dozens of CSS-based web sites, and I’m not even sure anymore if everything works because developers payed special attention to IE 6 and IE 7, or is it because IE 8 is mature enough to render CSS layouts properly.

What works, what isn’t working

PNGs work without hacking. Rounded corners with CSS not. Text shadow — no. Alpha transparency is still possible only with proprietary filter property, for instance filter: alpha(opacity=10);.

Naturally, if you want your CSS to validate — this rule has to be extracted in separate file, preferably with conditional comments.

The old typeface order bug is still present, and easy font embedding with @font-face doesn’t work either, so if you prefer this method, read how to do it in IE.