CSS: lowest common denominator question?

I think you just have to choose your battles carefully.

If a site has square corners in IE and round corners in other browsers there is no loss to either apart from the visual aspect and in many cases square corners can be more pleasing than all these round corners that pop up everywhere.

Most of my larger clients these days are now happy to use border radius and just let IE be square rather than cluttering up the mark up.

A lot of the css 3 effects though can be accomplished in the stylesheet and not in the markup so there is really no conflict there. It’s once you start changing the html that you have to decide whether it’s worth it or not.

With one or two lines of css3 you can change a basic dropdown menu into an animated dropdown with no loss of function to other browsers. I just added a couple of line to this menu in about 10 seconds but you will only see the effect in latest Safari. there is no loss of function but you can enhance the menu for capable browsers.

As John Allsopp said in the CSS3 live course we should be educating our clients that browser differences are a feature not a bug :slight_smile:

There is no harm in using css3 with progressive enhancement as long as the site looks good and works well without it. The fact that it’s different in various browsers is a feature of that browser and doesn’t have to be duplicated exactly by all.

The bottom line is that the site should still be accessible to all but that doesn’t mean it has to look the same to all.