(This is an article for HTML/CSS newcomers.)
When building Egytpological we took the decision that:
- we wouldn’t support IE6, and
- would support IE7 and IE8 for functional essentials (while pushing the design further in better browsers)
The attached table gives some clues as to why this is necessary. It shows browser compatibility for pseudo elements. The sea of red in the columns showing what Internet Explorer doesn’t support explains our decision.
So what are pseudo elements? Anybody who has written HTML will be used to tags like <b> or <div>. Most people who leave comments will know many of the simple HTML tags as well. Web sites like Egyptological use “style sheets” to apply formatting to these. It’s what is called CSS which stands for Cascading Style Sheets. For instance, the style sheet is used to put the halo around articles. That is a straightforward style as I explained in an earlier article. What is harder is making everying that comes after the halo opaque again. There are a numberof ways of doing it but I use “child selectors” which simply say “to all siblings of a halo, remove opacity”.
By Kate Phizackerley