Again with the Browser support charts

If you had told me over 8 years ago, when we were first doing our browser CSS support charts that in late 2006 I'd still be compiling charts of how well new browsers support CSS (and the answer being "OK") I really don't think I'd have believed you. Think about this: the web is now more than twice the age it was then. Yet, we still need to worry about at least one of the browsers which was around back then (well, at least a bit).

All this by way of prefacing the announcement that in light of the recent release of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows (which any day now is going to be pushed onto tens of millions of XP desktop via auto update, breaking a whole lot of web sites), we've just updated our browser support charts for CSS.

They are a bit easier to do than in 1998 when we first started, and we personally tested every browser for support of every CSS selector, property and @rule. These days we tend to aggregate the results of other people's tests, and what developers tell us about their level of support. Goodness knows why they didn't tell us this back then

Back then too, there were really only a couple of sources for this information. The oldest, initially compiled by that giant of the CSS world, Eric Meyer, and originally published at WebReview.
While developing the original version of Style Master, we realized that browser support for CSS was a real stumbling block for developers, and so we decided to build this info right into the app. I really can't remember if anyone had ever done anything similar, I certainly don't recall it.
Rather than simply take the info published by WebReview - that's not our style - we decided to do all the testing ourselves - and once we had, we reckoned there was probably some value in having one source of information - to double check what in some cases was a very complex task, and so that if other sources were no longer available then ours would still be there.

Since then, quite a few people have done something similar - and more than one has published our information as their own - if you find any support info out there for webtv, I have a pretty fair idea who did the testing.
I think the best resources along these lines now are the more in depth ones like quirksmode, and position is everything. Yeah, its kind of useful to know that page-break-before isn't supported in a certain browser, but these days the kind of use many developers put CSS to goes far beyond such simple stuff.

I suspect we'll keep publishing our support charts for as long as browsers don't fully support CSS - I just hope my daughter (one in a couple of weeks) never has to maintain them.