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.
![Create a CSS Cube]()
CSS cubes really showcase what CSS has become over the years, evolving from simple color and dimension directives to a language capable of creating deep, creative visuals. Add animation and you've got something really neat. Unfortunately each CSS cube tutorial I've read is a bit...
![Responsive and Infinitely Scalable JS Animations]()
Back in late 2012 it was not easy to find open source projects using requestAnimationFrame() - this is the hook that allows Javascript code to synchronize with a web browser's native paint loop. Animations using this method can run at 60 fps and deliver fantastic...
![MooTools Typewriter Effect Plugin Upgrade]()
Last week I shared my MooTools Typewriter Class with you. It was pretty well received and I got a few feature requests that I've implemented including "backspacing" and character variance delays. I'm not going to explain the old code, so click here...
![jQuery Chosen Plugin]()
Without a doubt, my least favorite form element is the SELECT element. The element is almost unstylable, looks different across platforms, has had inconsistent value access, and disaster that is the result of multiple=true is, well, a disaster. Needless to say, whenever a developer goes...
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.