Shift8 Creative Graphic Design and Website Development

With newer browsers being released that take advantage of HTML5 and CSS3, especially the browsers on the mobile devices, now is the time we are able to start leveraging some really powerful features. A lot of seemingly simple effects had to rely on JavaScript, which is still fine and even better now - newer browsers run JavaScript faster. However, we are still in a period of migration. We fortunately have all decided as internet citizens to stop supporting IE6 (more or less), but we still have IE7 and IE8 to deal with. They're better, but still not on the same bandwagon as the other browsers. They're still running along side with us though so we have to feed them too. Let's cross our fingers for IE9.

Despite all this, I think there's some really clever things you can do with CSS and CSS3. These effects are now becoming feasible, whereas in the past they were not. So real quick here I'm going to list a few really great resources for you instead of re-inventing the wheel...er copying and pasting code snippets...

• CSS3, please! is just an awesome little site that shows you a few little tricks to get the effect you're after working in many browsers. 
• Another great site is the simply and stylish CSS3 Generator. However, it doesn't really care much about Internet Explorer's needs. 
• Boog Design has a very nice matrix calculator for CSS3 rotations, IE likes to use this Matrix thing with radians, yea like that makes sense, you can check out the goods here or read more from the blog post. 
• Bonus: Hey, remember that pngfix.htc stuff for IE? There's one for rounded corners too!

Personally, I say go ahead and use these advanced CSS styles...If it's supported in IE great...If not, maybe you can find a graceful degradation solution. I just don't think IE will change or upgrade until we start building sites that are more in line with the standards and move in the direction the rest of the world is moving in. Microsoft will eventually comply..But not if we keep giving in to them. In the meantime, don't miss out on building a clean looking web site, with little hassle, for that iPad or Android based device.