Lore

Support… the unsupported

As new technologies and trends arise in front-end development, we always take a catious approach to ensuring compatability with older browsers. What we’ve come to realize is that global usage stats are not realistic measures for every client; more that it’s dependent on their current userbase and how a drastic change may affect them. Let’s look at a few examples and how we can get around these common cruxes:

  1. Media Queries: Taking a very high-level look at this – it’s perfectly acceptable to assume that IE6-8 users wouldn’t be able to experience all of the responsive goodness in their browser. They’re old, slow and often joked upon pieces of software that are the bane of many developer’s existence. The problem arises when you develop mobile-first; meaning you are developing for smaller screens and adjusting for larger displays. Doing this has its advantages that I won’t go into detail here, but should IE users only see a mobile-view of your site? While this may be okay at times, you’ll mostly get jeers. Luckily, there’s a library called RespondJS that enables media queries in browsers that don’t support them. Simply include in your header (wrap in a conditional IE statement for unneeded checks in modern browsers), and you’re good to go.
  2. Advanced CSS Selectors: When using CSS frameworks like Foundation and Bootstrap, advanced CSS selectors reduce the size of stylesheets and provide hooks to target elements outside of the normal class or id attributes. Low-and-behold, IE6-8 no likey most of these. As with RespondJS, Selectivizr is a JS library used to fill the void. Add the same as the former and you’ll see automatic improvements.
  3. REM Units: The REM unit is relative to the root—or the html —element. That means that we can define a single font size on the html element and define all REM units to be a percentage of that (source). This is helpful when requiring more exact measurements and scaling elements on a page. If you didn’t guess it by now, I’ll spare ya the anxiety, IE8 and below don’t support REMs. There’s two ways to get around this:
    1. REM unit polyfill: An all JS (and automatic) solution; similar to RespondJS and Selectivizr. As this dynamically reads your CSS and calculates appropriate px values – I’ve personally run into performance issues when the amount of declarations is pretty high (up to the script timing out).
    2. Grunt pixrem: As part of your build process, either duplicate your selectors as part of your distributed assets or create a “px dependant” file that you can conditionally load to IE8 and below; similar to how you would for the other JS solutions.

Sound a bit confusing? Before all of these amazing open-source libraries, front-end development was a slice of hell. Luckily, we have the tools to produce more stable, forward-thinking experiences while providing fall backs for all the browsers that don’t support them (i.e. IE; pun intended).

If you are or know someone that is a front-end developer, show that you care by upgrading some poor soul to a modern browser today.