b++ 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.
001—2009.03.22.17:04
Isn’t there a new way to apply opacity with -ms-prefix?
-ms-filter: “progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=0)”;
Also, the incorrect handling of gamma information in PNG files is still present.
002—2009.03.23.12:46
I’m finding there is something odd with min-height 100% – that is used in a few sticky footer techniques. Its only been out a few days and has already wated 4 hours of my time!