

Progressive Internet Explorer - tilt
https://github.com/lojjic/PIE

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vital101
I've used PIE on a handful of projects. Performance only suffers if you're
attaching it to a ton of elements. Using it here and there doesn't cost too
much.

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drivingmenuts
I have to question if we should be supporting IE6 at all with these
endeavours. I see it as encouraging people to continue using busted tools that
are clear and present dangers to the web environment.

I _get_ the counter-argument, but on the whole, I'd rather see IE6,7 and 8
just die. If corporations are too risk-averse to get rid of a clearly-broken
tool, why should we help them out?

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hendrik-xdest
You obviously haven't been working with companies in the financial sector.
Those Fortran developers you always hear about, this is were they are working.
Many companies in that sector use rather old systems that can't be replaced.
Some of those systems rely on IE6 or IE7.

I do work for a company that targets that sector and we calculate with a user
base of about 50% that still use one of those browsers. Yet, we want them to
have all the bells and whistles that the web offers today as well. This will
change (and is changing) but rather slowly. Some might even say it barely even
moves.

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elliottcarlson
This is also the case in the Pharmaceutical sector. The IE6 user base accounts
for the majority of the users and therefor it was the primary development
platform but still requiring the bells and whistles.

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scotto
And for the utility sector in they Bay Area. Legacy systems were actually
_built_ for IE6. It's so proprietary and ingrained into the work processes,
that in order to use current versions of vendor products they have to install
Firefox! Ha!

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cyril_st_john
> But as we all know, due to Internet Explorer's lack of support for any of
> these features, we must be patient and refrain from using them, and make do
> with the same old tedious techniques for the foreseeable future.

Couldn't disagree with this more. Let your site have square corners, no
shadows, and no animations in IE. The users won't know or care.

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prodigal_erik
This. Your documents should use progressive enhancements that make them at
least accessible (if not pretty) with _every_ browser that has ever existed.
If you write something that only works on FF5 or IE9, you did something wrong,
and someday we'll be cursing you just as you curse people who wrote stuff that
only work on IE6.

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LoonyPandora
There is a branch of PIE that supports text-shadow which makes it even more
useful.

I used it on my site re-design because we have multiple text-shadows creating
a graphical effect on our logo without images.

It works really well and performance doesn't suffer noticeably. In fact with
multiple box-shadows IE8 was faster to scroll than Safari 5.0!

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jwarzech
If the features of this library continue to expand I can see this being a very
powerful tool. As lot of other commentators have pointed out despite having so
many modern browser solutions a lot of large corporate environments are slow
to update. Quite often this is because they have large line-of-business apps
that are written to target certain browsers (especially if ActiveX is heavily
used) as well as having a culture where even a version bump in what web
browser is used takes a committee and months of approval.

I ran into this problem years ago when I was interning at one of the major
auto manufactures. I needed to provide web-based charting but was unable to
get approval to use an open source toolkit. I ended up having to write my own
library and did so using SVG. It worked no problem on the Solaris workstations
running old-school Mozilla (even still had the old Netscape icon) but for the
PCs running IE6 I had to get approval to install the Adobe plugin.

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hendrik-xdest
I use PIE for a charting software we created at my company. Here are some
problems we had:

The latest release of PIE is used for IE7 and IE8 but we had some issues with
it in IE6 where it would throw JavaScript errors. In addition, there is a
problem with hidden elements (style="display: none") for example PNGs with
transparent backgrounds or elements that have a linear background and rounded
corners. If those become visible without reloading the page, the styles might
not be applied correctly. You may find black images instead of the PNGs or
missing element styles. This cannot be reproduced regularly, though. I found a
beta version somewhere in the message boards that fixes the issues but does
not work well with other versions of IE.

We never had any performance issues although we quite heavily use layout
elements from CSS3.

BTW: The main website can be reached here <http://css3pie.com>

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peregrine
Anyone have experience using things like this? I've just now heard about these
behaviors and I worry about performance..

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jordanlev
I used it on a recent website project. It worked great for small forms (3-5
fields), which needed rounded corners and drop-shadows on the fields. It did
not work so well for our dropdown navigation menu, things just seemed to be
complicated when combining all the show/hide/hover css for that with the PIE
effects. (So we wound up using traditional non-semantic markup for
rounded/shadowed background images on the menus, but kept PIE for the more
straightforward form fields).

Others have reported problems of slowness when used on too many elements in a
page, but we never experienced this (because we didn't have "too many"
elements on the page).

If you're already familiar with how to make IE-compatible shadows/corners by
faking it with background images, I'd probably just stick with that. But if
you want to forge ahead with CSS3 but also have an easy drop-in solution that
gets you 80% there on IE, PIE is a good choice.

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tzury
that is allot of code (== effort) for making things looks good (aesthetically)
on IE 6-8.

I see there files created few days ago, and I wonder, why in July 2011 people
and corporate will stilll choose to use IE6/7/8 when FF/Chrome/Safari
available for Windows, for free, and support all or most advanced, neat HTML5
features

Should not corporate care most about information security? How can they let
instances of those versions of IE in an organization's network?

~~~
joshuacc
The problem for corporate environments is that they tend to have a few really
big legacy applications which only function correctly in older versions of IE.

The question then becomes whether to upgrade the application (with a massive
price tag), or keep their old version of IE as the standard (which _appears_
to cost nothing). In fact, there are costs of maintenance and security, but
those aren't readily apparent on the balance sheets.

~~~
Nat0
That is the case at my company, over half of the web based applications that
we have to use are built exclusively for IE. It is a massive pain, but I do
not see it changing any time soon.

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dasil003
Is the name a homage to PositionIsEverything.net? The quintessential IE6 CSS
bug documenter since the first wave of web standards?

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mmuro
You know what's a progressive Internet Explorer? IE 9 or 10.

Let's quit trying to duct tape the web for IE's sake.

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suyash
Just the tool I was looking for, but the current support for CSS3 rules is
very limited, I hope they add more implementations for IE. Thanks Jason.

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SolarUpNote
It's working for me. There's about a 1 second delay before the CSS3 styles
kick-in. But that's not a deal-breaker.

This is fantastic.

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geuis
For what it's worth, we used PIE for IE7 support of some css3 features at my
last job. Performance was _awful_ and buggy. I do not recommend trying to
force non-essential graphical niceties onto browsers that can't support them.
If you or your boss is insisting on some insane pixel-per-pixel matching
between all browsers, either you or they are wrong.

