Double Vision – Give the Browsers CSS They Can Digest
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Some but not all browsers support CSS2. You can deliberately code your website so that users of either kind of browser will see pages that are appropriate for what their browser can handle. Older browsers won't gag, but you will still be able to take advantage of what you can do with CSS2 in the newer browsers. Read on to find out how.
When surfing the Web, one might encounter websites that look completely different in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox/Opera. We don’t mean websites with bugs, or ones that were developed for MSIE only. We’re talking about websites deliberately showing a different style in the two of them. One example would be this CSSZengarden submission: (http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=http://icant.co.uk/zen/sample.css).
The reason for these websites is to show how much more a browser that properly supports CSS2 can offer. This technique is called progressive enhancement (http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=ProgressiveEnhancement), or graceful degredation (http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/
abdesign.html#degradability) - depending on which way you look at it – from newer to older or older to newer browser.
It is nothing new - clever Web developers have done to same to send a basic style sheet to older browsers like Netscape 4, and a different one to more advanced browsers:
<link rel="StyleSheet" href="basic.css" type="text/css">
<style type=”text/css”>@import “advanced.css”;</style>
Netscape 4 does not grasp the @import directive and applies basic.css exclusively. More modern browsers also read advanced.css and overwrite or re-use what has been defined in basic.css. The same can be done today for yet a newer breed of browser. This can be achieved in several ways.
Next: The way of the dark side – code forking >>
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