PIE 1.0 beta 5 released

It’s that time again… another PIE release! Version 1.0 beta 5 is now ready for your coding pleasure.

What’s new and big in this release? IE9 support! This release fills in the few CSS3 features that PIE already supported in IE 6-8 that aren’t natively supported by IE 9’s own rendering engine, specifically: linear-gradient in backgrounds, and border-image.

These features were totally re-implemented for IE 9 using SVG behind the scenes, which allowed us to avoid some of the limitations of the VML used in earlier IEs. For example: you can freely use rgba colors with opacity in gradients, and you can use the ‘repeat’ and ’round’ schemes in border-image. You can also use gradients in conjunction with background-size/position/repeat to create complex background patterns — we’ve got a new demo of some gradient patterns you can check out in IE 9.

Please note: IE 9 is apparently much more strict than earlier versions about requiring PIE.htc to be served with the correct content-type header. As always, make sure your server is configured to send the correct content-type header for .htc files.

In addition to the new IE 9 support, many other issues have been resolved including:

• The border-image support in IE 6-8 has been improved: it now correctly hides the actual border, and prevents collapsing of the border-width if a border-style is not set
• An error caused by non-px units on elements that cannot have children has been fixed
• The background origin and clip parameters are correctly parsed within -pie-background styles
• Padding on img elements is now correctly rendered
• Style changes due to :focus and :active pseudo-classes are now correctly detected
• The ‘transparent’ keyword is now recognized as a color when parsing styles
• A small number of IE installations out there without a functioning VML engine will no longer see errors and will fall back to non-CSS3 styles
• Various error conditions are fixed

See the full commit log for more details about the changes.

A note about file size: due to the added IE 9 support, the PIE.htc file is now roughly 6kB larger than the beta4 release. It is planned for a future release to split out IE 9 support and IE 6-8 support into separate files so the download size will be smaller for each version. We recognize that keeping this thing light is very important.

A special thanks go to the users in the forums who helped test and reported bugs against development builds of the new IE 9 support. Getting your real-world testing made a big difference in its quality!

Ready to go? Download PIE 1.0 beta 5 and get to it!