With viewport units, you can describe width, height, font-size and other CSS styles as percentages of the viewport width and height. There are, however, a few nasty gotchas when it comes to using them in iOS Safari and IE9 and 10. They also don’t always play nice in CSS3 calc() statements and don’t work at all in IE Visual Filters. Using them in iframes can also be problematic. This post talks about how to work around these issues easily using a JavaScript buggyfill (not polyfill). I have used viewport units in production sites today, and now you can too, on any phone or device used in the wild today.

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Last week, I discussed several strategies web developers can use to simulate CSS text-shadow in IE. In that article, I mentioned that there was no way that I knew of to simulate text-shadow with a blur-radius in IE without JavaScript. Since then, I have discovered a way to simulate the CSS text-shadow effect in IE9 that does not use JavaScript and does not add extra elements to the DOM.

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CSS3 text-shadow rocks, but it doesn’t work in any version of Internet Explorer, including IE9. While it is impossible to replicate all text-shadow effects in The Browser That Likes To Be Difficult, there are some ways to emulate this effect without JavaScript using Visual Filters, even when ClearType is enabled. This article can show you how and contains lots of examples.

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Ever had a problem with using IE’s Alpha Visual Filter and getting blocky text? A solution has been found, and it doesn’t use JavaScript. I expect to hear a sigh of relief from many developers.

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Although I have been doing a lot of work on cssSandpaper lately (JavaScript API for cross browser CSS3 animation anyone?), I have also spent a little time on an equally worthwhile project CSS3 Please. While cssSandpaper tries to give developers an all-in-one interface in which to do transforms, gradients and other nifty effects via simple CSS and JavaScript, CSS3 Please gives developers the opportunity to fill in the blanks of a stylesheet and see how CSS3 properties can be coded without the aid of JavaScript so that they work across the browsers that support it.

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The CSS transform property allows developers to rotate, scale, and skew blocks of HTML via CSS. There are variants that work natively on all major browsers … except for IE. I created a new library, cssSandpaper, that implements CSS3 transforms (as well as gradients and box-shadows) in IE. It also allows developers to use one transform declaration, instead of three vendor-specific ones for Opera, Firefox and WebKit browsers.

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