Pie in the Sky?

July 18, 2010 8:42 AM

CSS3 Pie. Google's Frame requires users to install Frame in order to get the benefits of CSS3 support (among other things). CSS3 Progressive Internet Explorer aims to bring support for CSS3 in IE versions 6 through 8 via a server side script. It's early days for the extent of supported properties but there are more to come. If it's ultimately functional and useful long term remains to be seen.
posted by juiceCake (21 comments total)

This looks like something that might be VERY useful to a project that I'm working on right now. I'll have to try it out to see, but assuming that it's as useful as it looks, thanks a lot, juiceCake!
posted by Edgewise at 8:48 AM on July 18, 2010

One of the most important things in the move to HTML5 is the shims that will bring backwards compatibility to IE. Whether it's iecanvas (thanks google) or this.
posted by SirOmega at 8:55 AM on July 18, 2010

I'm just thankful @font-face is becoming more widespread (particularly using OTF).
posted by adoarns at 9:30 AM on July 18, 2010

thanks JC! this should be very helpful around the office! and thanks Google, for helping out Microsoft while they continue to look for those web standards documents they seem to have misplaced.
posted by h0p3y at 9:55 AM on July 18, 2010

Screw backwards compatibility. IE6 and 7 must die along with XP and it's hundred million system strong botnets. Energies would be better spent training IT staff to upgrade to IE8/9 or whatever and patching the code that needs fixing. We need a y2k level effort to kill these old systems off.
posted by humanfont at 10:04 AM on July 18, 2010

totally with you humanfont - but out clients go with the stats - and we can put a bullet in the brains of no browser til it's overall number drop to 1-2% - and have you ever tried explaining this stuff to clients? and some companies would need to be doing this at the enterprise level - try talking some of THOSE IT guys into your idea :)
posted by h0p3y at 10:14 AM on July 18, 2010

*but OUR clients - gah
posted by h0p3y at 10:14 AM on July 18, 2010

I'm with humanfront on a personal level, but like it or not, ~10% of the internet (and unfortunately, that 10% includes a lot of corporate folks) views everything with IE6. As long as that's the case, we have to keep building sites that look good in IE6. That old beast can't die too soon for me, but even if it does, we still have IE7 to worry about. Not quite so bad, but not exactly great either.
posted by Alterscape at 10:46 AM on July 18, 2010

Stuff like this strikes me as only encouragement for companies that make develop sites that only work with IE 6. Like my company. Of course, we're still using Java 4, so this is hardly surprising.
posted by tommasz at 11:50 AM on July 18, 2010

um, make.
posted by tommasz at 11:51 AM on July 18, 2010

I am totally using this on my next project. Hell, on my current project. The tenacity of these wonderful people who labor to drag IE's standards support into the current generation by whatever obscure methods they discover never ceases to amaze.
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 12:15 PM on July 18, 2010

have you ever tried explaining this stuff to clients?

Yes. I turn them into an angry mob in an anti IE6 peasants storming IT with demands for an IE update lest their systems be corrupted by the taint of malware and the scent of old age, which as well all know is death to your brand.
posted by humanfont at 1:42 PM on July 18, 2010

Yes. I turn them into an angry mob in an anti IE6 peasants storming IT with demands for an IE update lest their systems be corrupted by the taint of malware and the scent of old age, which as well all know is death to your brand.

And then IT explains to the patiently, carefully that 10 years ago when they designed their Critical System A, they did it all browser based (crazy innovative for the time). Unfortunately the Javascript was written in a non-agnostic way as IE6 was basically all there was at the time. The IE quirks were baked into the code and this is a down year and you expect us in a recession to rewrite this program that works fine in IE6? It is the program the department uses for all their day-to-day needs, blame management for not allocating more money to maintaining and updating the program and instead bank a few million in extra money for the bonuses by calling it "cost savings."

But then you say, fine let them keep IE6 and run a separate browser in parallel for everything else. That too is fine, until you realize that 90% of the people will not leave IE6, unless they absolutely have to. So then you get into blocking IE6 from going to any site but that one, and the users are up in arms because they don't understand why they can't keep using IE6 and why they have to use two browsers when yesterday they weren't even aware of the concept of the browser but only knew to click the Accounts Payable icon on their desktop.

And this is why the business world still uses IE6 a lot. IE6 was released not even 10 years ago and was dominant up until at least 2006-2007. Most users here are technical and this all seems silly. They don't know that when you have a department of 200, scattered over 3 branch offices, switching browsers is not a trivial task. Doing anything that changes how people work day to day requires training and inefficiencies due to learning a new system.

Case in point: One time an employee was upgraded and even though favorites and everything else were transferred, the drop down quick suggestions did not. You would have thought that was the equivalent of giving her a broom and mop and telling her she now had to clean the bathrooms every day.

Right now the cost of switching for a lot of companies is a lot more than using a clever hack like this. If you want the real reason IE6 is still around it is because the average user has a technical competency well below what really it should be.

Of course the low technical competency are actually producing things that are better in the long run for such people ... terminal computers, browser-based operating systems, etc.
posted by geoff. at 1:59 PM on July 18, 2010

I should add that I think the idea in management that costs should always be attributed to some sort of revenue, directly realized revenue, that is the heart of the problem. Changing IE6 will cost money? What will gain? Embedded Youtube clips? And it'll cost how much? Without seeing the larger picture.
posted by geoff. at 2:04 PM on July 18, 2010

Yes. I turn them into an angry mob in an anti IE6 peasants storming IT with demands for an IE update lest their systems be corrupted by the taint of malware and the scent of old age, which as well all know is death to your brand.

hrm - reasonable clients you say - where is this workers paradise you have found?? :)
posted by h0p3y at 3:45 PM on July 18, 2010

I'm perceiving a contradiction here. The reason that people still use IE6 is because they are so phenomenally incompetent that they can't tolerate even a microscopic change in their workflow, right? So therefore everyone ought to spend lots of money and effort making their cutting-edge web applications look acceptable to these apparently-literal human cogs? Why not just ignore them? They're not going to sign up for your clever social networking site.
posted by breath at 10:19 PM on July 18, 2010

Shades of Dean Edwards' IE7-js.
posted by Plutor at 6:42 AM on July 19, 2010

Energies would be better spent training IT staff to upgrade to IE8/9

Or actually giving Firefox or Chrome or something some kind of easy network deployability/control, so that it's easier for IT staff to adopt and maintain and there isn't so much complaining about rollout costs.

I often wonder why this is such a big blindspot for browsers with real backing.
posted by weston at 2:11 PM on July 19, 2010

My entire office runs on ie6 except for my computer. I was stuck using it for weeks before my boss forgot to nuke my privileges after making me a local user. I didn't realize how bad it really was. And that was 7, not 6. I would have sold the rights to my firstborn for this sort of thing.
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 4:20 PM on July 19, 2010

*7 not 6
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 4:21 PM on July 19, 2010

It's nice that we have adapters to make modern sites work with the hilariously broken IE6 and IE7, but this isn't a silver bullet. I work on a website that's heavily javascript-based, and javascript execution itself is horrible in IE7. To make matters worse, IE8 includes a "compatibility" mode that turns it into IE7, dog-slow javascript engine at all, so even IE8 users can get shafted by a slight misconfiguration.
posted by heathkit at 3:18 AM on July 20, 2010