PRE-S: The latest State of CSS survey is now open!
I’ll be doing a live stream this upcoming Thursday or Friday, going through it myself, but you might as well jump in first! The more people who take this, the more representative it is, and the browsers use the data from these to know what features need improving and what is missing, so it is worth the time to take!
Hello Reader,
I’ve been getting a lot of comments lately asking about browser support whenever I show off a newer CSS feature, and honestly, it’s starting to wear on me a bit.
Or well, that isn’t quite true. I’ve always gotten a lot of comments about browser support, but lately it’s been irking me more than usual.
Don’t get me wrong, I get why people ask!
Browser support is important, and we don’t want to use something so cutting edge that it breaks the way our site looks for most users.
Most videos where people ask, I have a link to the Can I Use table in the description already, and I explain how to use it as a progressive enhancement. The one exception I have for this is for very new and experimental things, like when I looked at reading-order and reading-flow a few weeks ago.
The reason I don’t specifically mention where browser support is in my videos is that a week after that video comes out, what I mention would be out of date anyway, and I can't update the video, or have a live support table like a blog post can.
I’d rather people look for themselves when they see the video, and decide based on their own situation.
But there’s a more important thing: we shouldn’t let perfect browser support stop us from learning about and even using new features.
We can use progressive enhancement and accept that some users might not get the fanciest experience, or come in with a feature query or two to provide a fallback.
Perfect browser support has never* been a requirement for good web development.
If it were, no one would have made sites when IE6 was a thing 😆.
Learn the new stuff, understand how it works, and then make informed decisions about when and how to use it.
*I realize that some people work in jobs where they might be told something different here. If that’s the case for you, I would encourage open dialogue when possible. The best argument is “I can make this happen in half the time using a newer feature, with this as a fallback that only about X% of our users will see” or something along those lines. Long-term maintenance is usually a lot easier with modern features as well.
🙋♂️ What I’ve been up to this week
I was recently asked about creating the glowing border effect from Google’s AI Mode, and it sounded like a fun challenge, so here’s how I did it!
My finished code is here, if you want to poke around at it, but in the video I mentioned there are probably ways to do it with actual transparent backgrounds, and there are several solutions over in the Discord Community now as well.
📝 Quiz time!
This will be easier for the old-school devs out there: Which CSS property do we use to ensure that an element will go under, rather than next to, a floated element?
- clear
- float
- overflow
- position
If this one was a bit too easy, we’re going to be slowly ramping up the difficulty over the next handful of weeks 🙂
As per usual, you'll have to head on over to YouTube to take a stab at the quiz, and once you answer, you'll see if you were right or not.
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⚡ Quick tips of the week
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🎙️ Podcast
It's been a bit of a grind lately
Been having a hard time getting anything done the last few weeks, and as I pull out of it, I talk about some of the issues around productivity culture in general, and how sometimes it seems like we are less productive than we might have realized.
LISTEN ON: APPLE | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | WEB
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🔗 Other awesome stuff around from the web
🏁
Have a fantastic week!
Kevin
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