Friday 23 November 2012

The new CSS3 @supports() rule is really rather cool!

As all devs know , browsers can in varying degrees be a right royal pain in the arse when it comes to standards compliance and when you throw in companies like Never Upgrade a PC Till It Breaks Inc. who are still running XP with IE6, planning your super duper new web site to support them can be fraught with problems.

Most of us are used to the idea of designing a UI that degrades into a DBA-UX  (Different But Acceptable User Experience) to do this we have to be able to work out exactly the support for each feature that use in our design and have some "alternate" view that we can switch to.

Up until now I have relied on the wonderful Modernizer.js which smooths out a lot of the inconsistencies between browsers particularly the older rust buckets that NUPCTIB Inc use.

However there is a new CSS rule that will also help you - ladies and gentlegeeks let me introduce @supports() which has the syntax

@supports <supports_condition> { /* specific rules */ }

@supports is supported in most of the current browsers but as you might expect IE has ignored it and Safari doesn't have it yet. If you do use it in your CSS and a browser loads it that does not know what @supports is.. it will ignore the enclosed block, so you can still use your normal methods.

Basically what @supports() does is , it queries the CSS engine for support of whatever it is you need and then invokes the enclosed CSS rules accordingly.

@supports (display: table-cell) { /* some table-cell css in here */ }



Will test the CSS capability for box-flex and apply the rule if it is supported
You can also use a negative test for a rule not being supported.

@supports not (display:table-cell) { /*cope with non support CSS here*/ }

... and you can string together logical NOTs and ORs!

@supports (display:table-cell) and (display:list-item) { /* CSS goes here }

I am sure you get the idea and can see the usefulness of this addition to the Designer's toolbox


 






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