In today's Internet world, the number of devices, browsers and browser versions in use are many. A problem facing a web developer is trying to insure the site renders correctly for the majority of end users since the developer does not control which browser a site visitor is using. According to elegantthemes.com, "One of the best jokes out there about being a web developer is that you spend 20% of your time coding. And the other 80% searching the internet for solutions to problems you run into." Therefore, any tools available to help in developing an accessible and usable site are invaluable.
The benefit of the CanIUse site is that it easily allows one to see if a property or feature is supported by which browsers and by which versions of a browser. Their index list of features is extensive and is not limited to only CSS and HTML but also JS and SGV among others so provides extensive developer support.
Besides being able to determine if a given feature or property is widely supported, one can find additional information in regards to browsers. The browser comparison page shows the number of versions each browser has gone through. This would indicate which browsers are consistently being worked on so would most likely support the newest features. The resources tab opens to a list of resources, with links to the source, if one would like to research the feature further and get more in-depth information on it. The known issues tab will forewarn the developer of possible bugs that may occur if the feature is utilized. The usage relative tab or usage-table page shows by percentage which are the most commonly used browsers. This would allow a developer to focus on insuring compatability with the most commonly used browsers. There is also a news page, and while certainly not comprehensive, gives a hint as to what type of things are currently being worked on.
The first property I chose was css-any-link. :any-link is a pseudo-class selector that will style a hyperlink anchor but the style will be independent of whether the link has been visited or not. I wasn't sure at first what the usefulness of this feature would be. I could see that it would, in certain situations for privacy, allow a user to cloak what sites were further visited, at least superficially. Its global support is listed as 97.62%.
Next I chose to look at the progress element. The HTML progress element codes for a progress bar to show how much of a particular task has been completed. It contains both an start and an end tag.The opening tag will contain a max and value attribute to indicate when the task is completed and how much of the task has been completed. Its global support is 99.37%. The basic CSS for the value attribute is width and height. According to CSS Tricks however, after that further styling could be tricky based on various browser versions.
With the amount of technology available to a developer, it is helpful to have a resource that gives a lot of valuable information in one place to save time. As the search function on CanIUse is designed as the main feature on the home page, one can quickly and easily get a lot of information on the subject being researched. The color-coded chart makes it easy to see at a glance the browser information and each page supplies additional information such as property definitions and a link to BrowserStack is even supplied which allows one to actually test a feature's compatibility with a particular browser.