Understanding CSS and the Modern Web - CSS3 Foundations - page 9

Here's where I drop the bomb: Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 are old browsers, despite all having significant market
share. Although each is superior to the next, their support of standardized CSS is poor. Versions 6 and 7 implement
CSS 2.1 but not particularly well. Version 8 has good support for CSS 2.1 but little for CSS3.
There is light ahead though. Although Internet Explorer 6 has around a 6% share according to these statistics, many
of its users are Asian based, so if your website is not targeting that audience, you may find those statistics greatly
drop. Internet Explorer 6 is such an old browser, and so troublesome to the future of the web that even Microsoft is
trying to make its users aware that they can upgrade, with the site www.ie6countdown.com . This site also con-
firms that Asia (in particular, China, with a 22.4% share) greatly contributes to that 7% global statistic.
Aside from Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, and 8, the only other old browser with a share greater than 1% is Mozilla
Firefox 3.6. It has good support for CSS2.1 and CSS3 and is not a problem browser by any means, but at the time of
writing, Firefox is in the double figures, at version 14. You would be forgiven for thinking you didn't have to test in
3.6 then because it's so outdated, but testing in Firefox 3.6 is something I highly recommend due to its having a mar-
ket share higher than 1% (generally a browser with a market share less than 1% is deemed as being redundant), and
you do just that toward the end of CSS3 Foundations .
So how do you deal with older browsers because they are still very much a part of the modern web?
It is important to remember that the web is open information and it is the person's job that is making that information
available as accessible to as many as possible. You shouldn't ignore users of old web browsers, but it's unrealistic to
provide them the same levels of features you would provide somebody using a modern web browser. You would still
like them to be able to see the beauty of the page you've created, just at the level their browser can support.
Say you've used some of CSS3's features such as rounded corners and background gradients. An older browser
doesn't understand these features, so it can't display them. Instead, that browser just shows square corners and a sol-
id background, as shown in Figure 1-3 and Figure 1-4.
Figure 1-3 An element with rounded corners.
Copyright © 2012, Eduardo Tunni ( http://www.tipo.net.ar ) , with Reserved Font Name “Average.”
Figure 1-4 The same element viewed in a browser that doesn't support CSS3's rounded corners.
Belgrano font designed by Daniel Hernández and Latinotype in 2011. All rights Reserved.
This is known as graceful degradation. In a browser that doesn't support CSS3, it simply falls back to what it does
support. The user of that browser still sees a nicely styled web page and is none the wiser to the fact that in a modern