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.
![Detect DOM Node Insertions with JavaScript and CSS Animations]()
I work with an awesome cast of developers at Mozilla, and one of them in Daniel Buchner. Daniel's shared with me an awesome strategy for detecting when nodes have been injected into a parent node without using the deprecated DOM Events API.
![Responsive Images: The Ultimate Guide]()
Chances are that any Web designers using our Ghostlab browser testing app, which allows seamless testing across all devices simultaneously, will have worked with responsive design in some shape or form. And as today's websites and devices become ever more varied, a plethora of responsive images...
![HTML5 Datalist]()
One of the most used JavaScript widgets over the past decade has been the text box autocomplete widget. Every JavaScript framework has their own autocomplete widget and many of them have become quite advanced. Much like the placeholder attribute's introduction to markup, a frequently used...
![CSS Counters]()
Counters. They were a staple of the Geocities / early web scene that many of us "older" developers grew up with; a feature then, the butt of web jokes now. CSS has implemented its own type of counter, one more sane and straight-forward than the ole...
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.