CanIUse Command Line
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:
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.
![Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos]()
David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...
![How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam]()
I love almost every part of being a tech blogger: learning, preaching, bantering, researching. The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe: dealing with SPAM comments. For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day. PER DAY. Bloating my database...
![New York Times-Style Text Selection Widget Using MooTools or jQuery]()
Aaron Newton made a great request to me last week: why not make my MooTools Documentation Bookmarklet function more like the New York Time's text selection widget. NYT's text selection widget listens for text selection and presents the user with a "search" icon...
![iPhone Click Effect Using MooTools or jQuery]()
One thing I love about love about Safari on the iPhone is that Safari provides a darkened background effect when you click a link. It's the most subtle of details but just enforces than an action is taking place. So why not implement that...
I need to get this hooked up to be an email responder bot! “Hey Steve does
${browserX}support${featureY}?” => auto respond ;-)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.
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.
There’s also this package available via npm.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/caniuse-api
Perhaps this would work better for that task.
Definitely an interesting article about this new npm tool, useful for those who like command line better then gui.