THE (NEAR) FUTURE - CSS: Professional Techniques for Modern Layout - page 230

Accordingly, be careful not to get cut! A number of sites can help you i gure out the exact
syntaxes and patterns you need to use these techniques.

http://css3please.com/
http://css3generator.com/
http://www.westciv.com/tools/gradients/
http://gradients.glrzad.com/

Furthermore, a number of JavaScript libraries can extend support for advanced CSS back into
older browsers, in some cases as far back as IE/Win 5.5. Some are very narrowly focused on
certain browser families, whereas others are more broadly meant to allow support in all
known browsers. h ese can be useful in cases where your visitors haven't quite caught up with
the times but you don't want them to miss out on all the fun.

http://css3pie.com/
http://www.useragentman.com/blog/csssandpaper-a-css3-java
script-library/
http://www.keithclark.co.uk/labs/ie-css3/
http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/ (actually a good deal more powerful than
the URL makes it sound)
http://ecsstender.com/

232

h ere are also a good many CSS enhancements available as plug-ins for popular JavaScript
libraries such as jQuery. If you're a user of such a library, dei nitely do some digging to see
what's been created.

Again: Be careful! While these techniques are powerful and can deliver a lot of power to your
pages, you need to test them thoroughly in the browsers of the day to make sure you didn't
just accidentally make the page completely unreadable in older browsers.

STYLING HTML 5
Styling HTML 5 is really no dif erent than styling HTML 4. h ere are a bunch of new ele-
ments, but styling them is basically the same as styling any other element. h ey generate the
same boxes as any other div , span , h2 , a , or what have you.

h e HTML 5 specii cation is still being worked on as of this writing, so this may change a bit
over time, but the following declarations may be of use to older browsers that don't know
quite what to do with the new elements.

article , aside , canvas , details , embed , figcaption , figure , footer , header ,
hgroup , menu , nav , section , summary { display : block ;}
command , datalist , keygen , mark , meter , progress , rp , rt , ruby , time , wbr { display :
inline ;}