Come on my fellow designers, how many times have you heard that phrase from your clients … “I’m looking at it in IE and it has a blue box around my logo” and you get that immediate rush. That feeling of instant realization where the little voice in your brain is screaming, run, RUN, this client is using IE6! Calmly you ask, “Mr. Client are you using IE6 by chance?” knowing full well the answer is YES!  Then the answer … “Of course, almost EVERYONE is still using Internet Explorer.”

Even though any active designer and web developer knows the answer to that question is no not everyone is using Internet Explorer enough do.  But Mr. and Ms. Client this article isn’t really about the fact that the trends show the numbers support loyal Internet Explorer users move between 6 to 7 and 7 to 8 and Firefox users typically stay with Firefox and the others stay with the others (Safari, Chrome and Opera) fairly consistently at least for the last two quarters.  This article is about what we as designers and developers do to make you, our clients happy and why you need to take a step back and just read one of the many articles we read on a daily basis to keep up with the ever growing changes in just browsers to make your sites consistent.  And, maybe when we as designers give you advice as to why you should go one way and not the other because it won’t work in IE it’s because we’re giving you the best case scenario to make your site consistent not because we’re lazy but because we want you to have the best looking site you can have and function well also.

No, I am not a bitter or angry designer/developer.  I am all about educating my clients and hopefully my future clients and sharing as much information as I can and reading and learning as many new techniques as I can.  So, below I am posting the most recent reliable browser usage trends and then I am going to re-post an excellent article originally posted on Smashing Magazine yesterday.  This is only one piece of the puzzle that goes into the design aspect of any site.

Clients, my question to you is; Do you realize that your designers are really more than just a notch up from the friend or relative who can buy a program to design a website?”  There is so much more to it.

CSS3 Solutions for Internet Explorer

By Louis Lazaris  |  April 28th, 2010

CSS3 is probably the hottest trend in web design right now, allowing developers the opportunity to implement a number of solutions into their projects with some very straightforward CSS while avoiding having to resort to nonsemantic markup, extra images, and complex JavaScript. Unfortunately, it’s not a surprise that Internet Explorer, even in its most recent version, still does not support the majority of the properties and features introduced in CSS3.

Experienced developers understand that CSS3 can be added to new projects with progressive enhancement in mind. This ensures that content is accessible while non-supportive browsers fall back to a less-enhanced experience for the user.

But developers could face a situation where a client insists that the enhancements work cross-browser, demanding support even for IE6. In that case, I’ve collected together a number of options that developers can consider for those circumstances where support for a CSS3 feature is required for all versions of Internet Explorer (IE6, IE7, & IE8 — all of which are still currently in significant use).

FOR ALL ENHANCEMENTS AND TIPS, PLEASE REFER TO THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE POSTED ON SMASHING MAGAZINE … CLICK HERE

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