What 3Sixty Knows…

A good article by Aaron Gustafson on A List Apart about progressive enhancement with CSS.

He describes a way of giving older browsers a set of basic styles, rather than giving them no styles at all (which is what we currently do). This was the topic of Jon Hicks’s talk at FOWD, and I thought it was quite interesting then too.

By linking to stylesheets in different ways, you can target different browsers. You use a straight-forward link to a stylesheet that only includes type information. All browsers get this and can mostly render it fine.

You then use the @import directive which cuts out the crappiest browser to feed them a stylesheet with the layout information, where typically most problems occur.

This is, effectively, a way of progressively enhancing the styles you feed a browser.

Seems like a nice idea in theory and something we should adopt on new sites. The only real issue I can see is that the more stylesheets you have, the slower the site becomes as more assets need to be downloaded. According to Yahoo, this has a major impact on a site’s speed.

Opinions please!