CSS3 carn’t be out for a few years?
First off before I get any haters getting on my case about this post, it is just my opinion regarding CSS3 and why it can’t be released for a few more years yet.
I was sat at work last week and we had a discussion about css3 and when we think it would be ready to use and why. I came up with the answer at least a few more years yet. The reason why I say this is IE6. I have heard some people saying that IE6 will be fazed out at the end of the year or should be dropped soon as IE8 gets a public release.
Yes I agree and fully support that IE6 should be dropped when IE8 gets a public release in an ideal world but nothing ever works out this way. I work at a small design agency and we work with local clients (as well as national clients) and sadly they are not always Internet savvy and don’t care what they use to get on the Internet, and they use… you guessed it IE6. I do not know what other agencies clients use and it will differ from agency to agency.
I am with the idea that we need to progress as a medium and get IE6 finished as a browser but this realistically is not going to happen for a few more years yet. I support people like 37signals, Bryan Veloso and others not supporting IE6. Even I don’t support IE6 fully on this blog, but until the client base is round about 10% we can not drop the support.
The main reason that I can see why people have not migrated to IE7 and above is Vista. Vista is not that bad, yes it is a hog on resources but it works well. But Vista was not/is worth upgrading. It was not the leap that people expected. It was not the 98 to xp.
If Vista was a amazing product I could see IE6 nearly dead but it wasn’t so we have to live with it…
Now you might be wondering what has IE6 and the IE6 bashing got to do with CSS3? Well if you think of it IE6 and IE7 (not sure with IE8 yet) wont be able to support CSS3. SO I can see the people at the w3c having to wait to IE can support CSS3 features like Mozilla, Safari and Opera and then we might see it slowly come out.
If CSS3 was to roll out next week the designers in us will want to use them in our projects and push the boat out. Some clients will want the features of this and then when they log on in IE they will be like “why is this not working?” they would have paid good money and expect it to work in all browsers. So If CSS3 was released it would lead to anarchy on the Internet. We would basically have two make to websites for some clients.
But we will be waiting a few more years still until IE6 can be buried with good old Netscape.
Please let me know your thoughts on this matter, and as I stated this is just my own personal thought regarding css3.
13 Responses to “CSS3 carn’t be out for a few years?”
Adam
July 26th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Good post Ryan, and some good thoughts there too. I can say I totally agree, that css3 won’t be here for a few more years, thus alot of company networks use ie6 still.
I work for a company also specialising in web media products, and alot of the clients use ie6.
Until the day where we all know that ie6 is in the bin, is when we should drop our guard and stop supporting it. But due to the fact that a lot of people still use ie6, i think it should be mandatory to support it.
That’s my two sence,
Take care Ryan.
Joel Watson
July 26th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
Ryan–
I think your perspective is reasonable, and it will probably be IE6 that holds up CSS3.
However, I am of the persuasion that innovations like CSS3 should be a motivating force in the killing of IE6. So for your clients whose sites break when they view them in IE6, educate them to upgrade to a browser that is less than ancient and outdated.
It seems harsh, but people can’t know to upgrade technology unless A.) they are educated to do so or B.) they hit a wall when the internet stops working for them on outdated technology. It is unreasonable that brand new technologies should have to support stuff that is outmoded (and terrible to begin with), especially when said technology is entirely free and simplistic to install.
So if we want to really kill IE6, new technologies that make it unusable are really the only way that the this is going to happen on a wide-spread scale. Vista was/is obviously not this answer (and Microsoft will never have this answer, but only continue to be the problem), so the only alternative at this point is if the internet ceases to function properly for IE6 users. CSS3 is an important part of this and should be implemented immediately.
Mona
July 27th, 2008 at 1:15 am
I liked your insight on the subject, Ryan.
You are obviously correct, though I share everyone’s disappointment that what you wrote is true. It’s a shame.
I could not agree more with Joel. I share the EXACT feelings he describes regarding the use of IE6 and he is absolutely right about forward progress being the only real solution to discontinuing its use. If it were implemented immediately, those of a less-than-tech-savvy crowd would quite simply be forced to make the very SIMPLE and PAINLESS change to better browsers, and from there the rest would be history.
Great input from everyone so far.
-Mona
Erika
July 27th, 2008 at 2:28 am
“However, I am of the persuasion that innovations like CSS3 should be a motivating force in the killing of IE6. So for your clients whose sites break when they view them in IE6, educate them to upgrade to a browser that is less than ancient and outdated.”
Now, I’m all for educating the client. They need to have some semblance of knowledge of the Internet and how it works in order to maintain a functioning website. However… say that you tell your client that you’re all for educating them about the whole browser story. What happens when they shoot back to you - “Well, everyone I know uses this browser. Why can’t you just make it work for everyone?”
It isn’t sound business advice to tell a client to minimize the number of people that can access their website because you “don’t want” to support a browser that - as shitty as it may be - still holds a large percentage of the browsing world hostage. A client would sooner fire you for someone who doesn’t let that get under their skin.
In short, you can tell the client to upgrade or migrate to a different browser and save us developers one less person to curse about that damn IE6. But the fact remains that we won’t be rid of the problem for a while. So…. suck it up.
LOL
Andrei Gonzales
July 27th, 2008 at 6:05 am
Personally, I don’t think we’ll see CSS3 in use until about 2012. It’s 2009 in a few months, and over 30% of the internet still use IE6. IE7 cannot even fully support CSS2 (IE8 will). Going by that time frame, the SOONEST we’ll see CSS3 will be in 4-6 years.
Matt Wiebe
July 27th, 2008 at 6:42 am
[pedantic]
first paragraph, last sentence: “fazed” should read “phased.”
[/pedantic]
One question I have is what you’re referring to when talking about CSS3 being “out.” Are you talking about the release of the final W3C Recommendation or the time at which it is deemed the CSS3 support in browsers is broad enough to really start using it?
That aside, a major reason that we will find it a slow, painful process to get IE6 the hell out of our lives is that locked-down corporate installations of XP will not only be slow to upgrade to Vista (obviously), but many are hesitant to even upgrade to IE7 within XP because it will break their (non standards-based) intranet. Nobody follows the “if it ain’t broke…” mantra more religiously than sysadmins.
My guess is that corporate users make up a large majority of remaining IE6 users, and this will only change very slowly. Ugh.
Peter Gasston
July 27th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
I think you might be a little confused on this subject. CSS3 is modular, which means different areas of it can be ratified as standards at different times. The CSS3 Selectors module, for example, is already stable and implemented in Firefox, Safari & Opera, and should be in IE8 as well. Lots of other CSS3 features are implemented in various browsers too; see http://www.CSS3.info for a list of what is and isn’t.
You can use certain elements of CSS3 right now; you just have to be sure to make your stylesheets degrade gracefully.
Certain other elements of CSS3 may not be implemented for many years to come.
Joel Watson
July 27th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
“Now, I’m all for educating the client. They need to have some semblance of knowledge of the Internet and how it works in order to maintain a functioning website. However… say that you tell your client that you’re all for educating them about the whole browser story. What happens when they shoot back to you - “Well, everyone I know uses this browser. Why can’t you just make it work for everyone?””
This is a non-sequitur. If the client is educated enough to know that their peers are using a particular version of a particular web browser, then this is beyond an education need and goes into the realm of an actual business need.
“It isn’t sound business advice to tell a client to minimize the number of people that can access their website because you “don’t want” to support a browser that - as shitty as it may be - still holds a large percentage of the browsing world hostage. A client would sooner fire you for someone who doesn’t let that get under their skin.”
It has nothing to do with not “wanting” to support a browser–no one can really support IE6 as it is a failed product. The best that can be done is that things can be made to work and look moderately ok in it.
But that’s not really the question, anyway. Part of being a good service provider is accommodating client’s needs, for sure. However, a big part of it is also telling them what they need to hear for them to get the best product possible, not what they want to hear just for the sake of closing a deal. The latter approach is rife with false promises and is actually counter-productive for the client in both the short- and long-term, whether they realise it or not.
“In short, you can tell the client to upgrade or migrate to a different browser and save us developers one less person to curse about that damn IE6. But the fact remains that we won’t be rid of the problem for a while. So…. suck it up.
LOL”"
Again, this has nothing to do with “sucking it up.” Anyway monkey with a keyboard can get things to look and work moderately well in IE6. But that misses the point. If one is really committed to customer service, moving clients to stable an extensible technologies is in everyone’s interest, most particularly the client’s.
Joel Watson
July 27th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
“That aside, a major reason that we will find it a slow, painful process to get IE6 the hell out of our lives is that locked-down corporate installations of XP will not only be slow to upgrade to Vista (obviously), but many are hesitant to even upgrade to IE7 within XP because it will break their (non standards-based) intranet. Nobody follows the “if it ain’t broke…” mantra more religiously than sysadmins.”
But that is exactly the best argument FOR the adoption of new technologies. If corporations want to continue to support IE6, let ‘em. It’s not like you have to upgrade your browser. If these corps refuse to spend the resources to bring their webcode into this century, then they can manage the headache of locking down their internal apps and browsers. I hardly see, though, that their stubbornness to change should mitigate the progress made by EVERYBODY else.
But additionally, what I we’ll see is that as people who work for these businesses go back to their private lives and modern browsers, they’ll see how much better the web can be than the terrible tools that their IE6-burdened corps force on them. Perhaps they will start to see the difference and lobby for change.
Ryan Downie
July 27th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
I agree with some points on where the discussion is going, I am in full support with trying to educate the clients regarding what browser that they use. However it is not good business sense to make something that looks different and has different functionality because of what browser that people use. You cannot say “well it works this way in Firefox 3, but you need upgrade your browser to see it this way”.
@peter I understand that CSS is modular and that we can implement some features at the moment but at the moment with IE still having the market share that it does we cannot add some of the features. Yes we can use things like –moz-border-radius to add rounded corners but can you really suggest using multiple background images? And then make more images for IE? I would see this a waste of time for client work.
Still saying that there are times where you can use the CSS3 features where we can. These would be sites that we have control over, ones that we own and run and where we don’t have to answer to clients and the business models of their business
Piotr Zalewa
July 28th, 2008 at 9:10 am
I think you’re right, but enough whining - one has to do something with it. So build commercial websites with IE6 in mind, but all other pages build for fun or these which are not revenue based shouldn’t support it.
A. It’s way cheaper to produce
B. It’s more fun
C. It will teach them
BTW. Use Save a developer javascript where you can: http://www.savethedevelopers.org/index.php
Gilbert
July 28th, 2008 at 9:19 am
I totally agree with what you are saying. Until the regular internet user is using a CSS3 compatible browser CSS3 will have to be limited in it’s implementation. Unfortunately I see this being later rather than sooner as most clients I deal with are totally unaware there are even other browsers out there. So we are basically waiting on IE getting its butt in gear.
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