At work all day I tinker on websites and fix common cross-browser issues. Any web designer will gladly tell you that these are the most annoying problems to run into especially when trying to support older browsers like IE6. This just don’t work as well but we aren’t quite past that point in current web design where we drive people to new browsers so they can see the latest and greatest. Businesses in particular suffer this curse because of massive amounts of testing that needs to be done and red tape that needs to be cut through to get changes in motion. Since I can’t break out the latest and greatest new supported CSS tags because of these legacy browsers I am forced to ignore them for now. I decided today to bring these to my own personal site for a fun change of styling pace.
First out I dropped the Javascript corner rounding script for the border-radius property (and of course the web-kit friendly version too). Not only have I just saved a script from running, I have a much more flexible way of changing the corners. Of course you say, “What about previous IE versions, even 8 didn’t support that!?”. To that I say, “So”.
– RANT BEGIN –
I’m going to break into a small rant here. One thing that irks me is how design is not helping to drive browser advancement. I am also an avid gamer and one example of this in the game design field is Crysis. Crysis is a series of games that has been pushing the graphical envelope on the PC. This is one of those games that you build a computer around, and if your old one is too slow, you buy a new one. This is how many ground-breaking PC game releases were. They were driving graphics card companies to make faster and more powerful graphics cards. They are games that are making 8 gigs of RAM a minimum in a computer these days. Yet the one industry that is not following this is the browser business.
It has taken this long and countless years just to finally get a round corner in a browser without annoying amounts of programming. The products being created are not driving the browsers to be better, the browsers are holding back what progress we are making. Now, of course, I say browsers, but I am of course referring to one in particular. Though one of the most widely used browsers around IE has taken the longest time getting its act together and now that IE9 is our, I’m going to take full advantage of it for personal projects.
If you come here with older browsers, you won’t get the full experience, I am going to admit that right now. If that irks you, tough. It is a very simple and easy process to upgrade your browser to the latest version. People don’t mind having to update a flash player because they wan’t to see dynamic content, but to view pretty stuff in a browser people just aren’t willing to go that far.
– RANT OVER –
Also you will notice some text-shadowing going on to help some of the text “pop” (which is a word that means absolutely nothing in the design business). Those changes plus a few tweaks to my post layout are all and I already like the look a little better. I also threw a shadow on the boxes that incorporate the blur effect.
Round corners…drop shadows…all I need are some gradients and I’ve hit the design motherload.
In the end this will probably be all scrapped for a whole new template, but since my life is pretty busy this will make it more manageable for the time.
Plus I got to have quite a bit of fun learning the ins and outs of CSS3 stuff.