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PIE 2.0 beta 1 released

I am thrilled to announce the release of CSS3 PIE 2.0 beta 1! This is the first official release of the 2.0 development line, which has seen several major refactoring efforts to improve performance, enhance feature support, and fix many long-standing bugs.

The major changes from 1.0 are:

  • PIE.htc is now a very small (~2K) stub file which loads a secondary logic file optimized for the current IE version, resulting in a smaller total download size. See the blog post on the new loading system for details on how this works and its benefits. As a user this shouldn’t change how you use PIE, except that instead of only copying a single file you now need to copy all the files in the distribution directory together as a unit.
  • A new -pie-load-path property can be set in the CSS for the <html> element to customize where the secondary logic files are loaded from, for example an external CDN.
  • The VML renderers in IE 6-8 have been heavily refactored: the resulting DOM is smaller, and the VML is now initially built up as a single markup string and inserted all at once instead of using the DOM API. This makes the insertion faster, and also allows the use of certain VML features that could not be used before (e.g. o:opacity2).
  • The linear-gradient parsing has been updated to support the final spec syntax (the “to side” syntax and new angle origin.) You will need to update your CSS to the new syntax to avoid incorrect angles or blank rendering.
  • Linear gradients with rgba colors can now render the alpha channel in IE 6-8, but only for gradients with two stops.
  • Linear gradients in IE 9 are now rendered using Canvas rather than SVG, which allows it to display properly when used along with -ms-transform.
  • Box-shadow rendering in IE 6-8 now properly renders the alpha channel in rgba colors when the shadow has a blur radius.
  • Border-radius rendering in IE 6-8 has been refactored, fixing the “bumps on corners” bug when the border width is larger than the corner radius, adding support for groove/ridge/inset/outset borders, and improving transitions around corners between differing border styles. The new border-radius demo page shows the improved rendering.
  • The background-origin, background-size, and background-clip parameters within the -pie-background shorthand property are now supported for non-repeating backgrounds in IE 6-8.
  • Various other minor fixes; see the full changelog for details.

This is definitely an early beta, so it’s very likely there are many new bugs to be squashed. While the stable PIE 1.0.0 release is still the recommended version for public sites, I do encourage everyone to try out the beta and report back any bugs or other issues you may encounter in the new 2.0.x beta forum. Even if you don’t encounter problems, reporting back your success will also be helpful to help us gauge stability and move toward a swift final release.

Download PIE 2.0 beta 1 and give it a try!

Thanks everyone!

PIE 2’s new loading mechanism

One of the guiding principles in the development of CSS3 PIE has always been to make it as simple to use as possible. That’s why it was designed as only a single standalone .htc file, without any external dependencies. Copy a single file and reference it — can’t get much simpler than that!

However, having a single monolithic file has posed some other problems. Especially with the introduction of IE9 compatibility which required entirely new renderers that use SVG instead of VML, PIE.htc grew to contain a lot of code that isn’t used by whichever browser is currently downloading it. IE9 has to download all the code for parsing and rendering border-radius and box-shadow using VML, for example, even though it has a native implementation. Similarly, IE6-8 have to download the IE9 SVG rendering code which they cannot use.

To make this even worse, IE has a strange bug that sometimes causes the .htc file to be fully or partially downloaded more than once, so the hit can be as much as doubled in some cases.

It was clear that the simplicity of a single file wasn’t worth this performance hit, so while I was designing the next generation of PIE one of my main goals was to implement a conditional loading system which didn’t sacrifice simplicity of use. I’m going to describe what’s been implemented so you know what to expect in the upcoming PIE 2.0 (first beta will be released soon!), and to solicit your feedback on it.

What’s different?

Firstly, PIE.htc is now very small. Like 2KB small. All it contains is enough logic to figure out what secondary JS file to load and where to load it from. So even if the double-htc-download bug happens, it’s only a tiny thing being downloaded twice.

The secondary JS files contain all the rest of the logic for parsing and rendering the CSS3 styles. There are currently two logic files: PIE_IE678.js and PIE_IE9.js, containing only the code needed by IE6-8 and IE9 respectively. The .htc file loads only the one appropriate for the current browser. (It’s possible that in the future these can become even more granular, for instance minimal builds that don’t include code for unused CSS3 properties.)

These secondary logic JS files will also double as the files for PIE JS Edition — just include them directly using conditional comments so only the appropriate one is loaded.

Can we get some numbers?

Let’s compare the difference in total download size. These are actual numbers from loading the css3pie.com homepage in IE:

Version Request Size
PIE 1.0: All IEs PIE.htc first request 8.27 KB
PIE.htc second request 40.35 KB
Total 48.62 KB
PIE 2.0: IE6-8 PIE.htc first request 2.00 KB
PIE.htc second request 0.17 KB
PIE_IE678.js 37.29 KB
Total 39.46 KB
PIE 2.0: IE9 PIE.htc first request 2.00 KB
PIE.htc second request 0.17 KB
PIE_IE9.js 25.80 KB
Total 27.97 KB

So we’re seeing about a 9 KB smaller total download in IE6-8, and 20 KB smaller in IE9. Of course that’s not the entire story — there’s the extra HTTP request for the JS file to take into account. So let’s take a look at the actual network timeline, on a simulated slow connection. Here’s PIE 1.0 in IE9, loading css3pie.com/blog:

PIE 1.0 Network Timeline

And here’s PIE 2.0 with the new loading system:

PIE 2.0 Network Timeline

As you can see, even with the extra HTTP request the total download time has still improved by more than a second. But what’s even more interesting is that while IE waits for the .htc file before firing document ready, it does not wait for the secondary .js file, so it fires a whole 6 seconds earlier! This means your other scripts that wait for document ready can start running much earlier, making your page feel snappier.

Customizing the loading path

When PIE.htc loads the secondary files, by default it loads them from the same server path as PIE.htc itself. This keeps things as simple as possible for users; as long as you keep the distribution files together in the same directory, you’re set.

However, for extra flexibility I’ve also added the ability for you to override that location if you wish, by specifying a new -pie-load-path property on the html element:

html {
    -pie-load-path: "http://any.server/path/to/pie-js-files/";
}

The path you specify can be anywhere on any server, as the JS files are not subject to same-domain limitations. You can even choose to load them from a CDN to take advantage of caching and geolocated delivery.

Help us test!

If you have any feedback on this new loading system, good or bad, I’d love to hear it. It’s very likely that unforeseen issues could pop up once it starts being used in the wild, so getting your help testing the new system is crucial! There will be an official 2.0 beta build released in the very near future; or if you can’t wait you can build PIE yourself from the master branch on GitHub and try it out right now. If you find any issues please post them in the forums.

PIE 1.0.0 Released

I am thrilled to announce the release of CSS3 PIE version 1.0.0!

This release marks a major milestone: the dropping of the “beta” label. Our five beta releases have given us twenty-two months of solid real-world testing as you, the web community, have used it on your sites. You’ve really put it through its paces, given us invaluable feedback and bug reports and helped us squash the bugs, and now we are confident in saying that PIE is solid and reliable enough to no longer be called a beta product.

Compared to beta5, the final version 1.0.0 contains only a few fixes for major issues:

  • Fixed divide-by-zero error in box-shadow renderer
  • Fixed error when element is removed after hovering
  • Fixed error when printing in IE9
  • Fixed rendering when using browser zoom in IE7 and 8

In addition, we have added support for two new custom CSS properties: -pie-track-hover and -pie-track-active — setting these to false will disable PIE’s default automatic tracking of :hover and :active styles, which can give a small performance boost and prevent issues with scrollbars in IE7 (see issue 190).

See the full changelog for details.

Download CSS3 PIE 1.0.0 now!

Moving Forward…

While focusing on stability for 1.0.0, we’ve been very busy with other things too! The master branch in GitHub, which will become the 2.0.x line, has already seen major architectural improvements, several new features, and lots of fixes. We’ll start releasing this cutting-edge code in 2.0 beta releases soon, in parallel with the rock-solid 1.0.x line, so stay tuned!

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!

CSS3 PIE Nominated in .net Awards 2011

The nominations for the .net Magazine Awards 2011 came out this morning. I was shocked when my wife came running in to tell me that PIE had been nominated!

PIE’s nomination is in the “Innovation of the Year” category, which puts it up against some impressive heavyweights such as Google+, jQuery Mobile, and (dear to my heart) Sencha Touch. I’m not sure how PIE got nominated, but to whoever made that happen: thank you! I feel greatly honored.

If you’d like to vote for PIE, hop on over!