CanIUse Command Line

By  on  

Every front-end developer should be well acquainted with CanIUse, the website that lets you view browser support for browser features.  When people criticize my blog posts for not detailing browser support for features within the post, I tell them to check CanIUse:  always up to date, unlike posts on any blog.  While I know to use the CanIUse website, I recently found out that Sam Gentle has an accompanying Node.js CanIUse module for looking up browser support.

To install the utility, use a typical npm install command:

# Install globally for less hassle
npm install -g caniuse-cmd

With the caniuse command available, you can look up feature support from the command line:

CanIUse

CanIUse

The display of results is pretty and it provides a listing of different matching features if the lookup is vague.  And because we can get this information in an automated way, you can probably write a decent scraper with cURL and other tools.

Recent Features

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos

    As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us.  Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos.  Another technology available...

  • By
    Conquering Impostor Syndrome

    Two years ago I documented my struggles with Imposter Syndrome and the response was immense.  I received messages of support and commiseration from new web developers, veteran engineers, and even persons of all experience levels in other professions.  I've even caught myself reading the post...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    iPhone-Style Passwords Using MooTools PassShark

    Every once in a while I come across a plugin that blows me out of the water and the most recent culprit is PassShark: a MooTools plugin that duplicates the iPhone's method of showing/hiding the last character in a password field. This gem of...

  • By
    Build a Calendar Using PHP, XHTML, and CSS

    One of the website features my customers love to provider their web users is an online dynamic calendar. An online calendar can be used for events, upcoming product specials, memos, and anything else you can think of. I've taken some time to completely...

Discussion

  1. Steve

    I need to get this hooked up to be an email responder bot! “Hey Steve does ${browserX} support ${featureY}?” => auto respond ;-)

  2. Dominik

    How about just adding canIuse as a search engine to your browser, like so http://caniuse.com/#search=%s?
    Simply typing “c webp” into my browser gives me even nicer formatted results.

  3. Sadly the output is not very useful for automated processing. It would’ve been nice if this could be implemented in a gulp-task, scanning CSS for a defined set of supported browsers, and if a css-declaration wasn’t supported it would throw an error.
    But as your example of ‘transform’ shows, it returns things like JPEG2000, so output parsing is required and tedious. Plus it seems that there is no option to print a simple boolean instead of fancy ticks and crosses.

  4. Definitely an interesting article about this new npm tool, useful for those who like command line better then gui.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!