Step away from the pie

Over the last few years along with most website designers I found myself increasingly using css3 properties such as text shadow, box shadow and rounded corners. Although subtle these features add style and depth to a website’s design and allow for that little bit extra in terms of detail.

In the past a first thought has always been “how is this going to look in older versions of IE?”. I experimented with a few fallbacks including jQuery corners, but eventually settled with css pie. At first it provided everything I needed allowing me to use multiple css3 styles with only one plug in that would work seamlessly across all browsers without compromise.

The joy however was short lived, the more I used Pie the more ‘bugs’ or side effects I found particularly when used on large projects with complex functionality. All in all offering a seamlessly rolled back website was adding large amounts of time and suffering to the project, as well as weight to the site with extra code and scripts needed.

In light of this my approach of late has changed, instead of doing everything possible to ensure the site is identical in all browsers and versions I now focus more on site speed and optimisation. I’m not going to ruin a well built compressed site with unnecessary scripts and http requests for the odd IE 7 user’s benefit.

I’m now a believer that a site should ‘Fall back gracefully’ everything will work as excepted and the overall layout will be consistent, but the little extras provided by css3 will no longer be present beyond IE 9.