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Comment by fr0man | Hacker News Reader

What is it with all the CSS articles/tutorials out there that rely on functionality that won't work in IE? I loathe IE with the fiery passion of a thousand suns, but if your tutorial for an image-free drop shadow technique won't work in it, you're wasting my time. 90% of my end-users use some form of IE.

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Maybe that means that those arcicles/tutorials are not for you or your end users. Elsewhere in the world IE has less than 50% share. Also, maybe those articles/tutorials are not assuming that everything should look the same in every browser. Maybe some are happy to have rounded corners, drop shadows in better browsers and think it is acceptable to provide square corners and no shadows for IE.

http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/

That's fine, but don't sell your tutorial as 'works in every browser'. The article is giving CSS hints that just won't work in IE<8 (and frankly, I've had very sketchy luck with 8 as well). That creates more work than it saves in some cases.

Where has IE fallen below 50%? I'd like to move there.

I think there are many uses for CSS (like a drop shadow) where your site should work just fine without it, and those who choose to use a better browser are rewarded with something that looks better. I believe the shorthand term for this concept is "degrades nicely". If more sites took advantage of that point of leverage, we could collectively speed the demise of broken browsers, and we wouldn't have to continue this debate into my autumn years.

I'm all about that, but quite a few of the jQuery plugins I've tried to use lately just flat break things in IE<8. I've had to back quite a few changes out.

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