JS Test for :target support

Question

I'm writing some code that involves CSS tabs, but IE doesn't support the :target css3 attribute. I have a work around by checking the hash value in an interval (ew), but I want to only have that code run when :target is not supported. I would do the regular IE check, except early versions of Firefox do not support it, nor does early Safari or Opera. Does anyone know how to test for :target support?

Answer 1

You can test for CSS support by adding a rule like #someid:target { visibility:hidden; color:#abcdef; } and then setting the target to #someid, reading if the color is #abcdef, and then reseting the hash.

This will, however, generate entries in the browser history: 1 for when you navigate to the id, and 1 for when you reset it to whatever it was before. It may also create a flicker in your tabs, so that may not be ideal - but I don't know what you can get away with.

Ideally, tabs should ideally read and write the hash for bookmarkability. But I don't think that :target is the ideal solution to creating tabs. I know it looks appealing to begin with (did to me). Given the poor support of the selector, how badly it scales with nested or multiple tabs, and how volatile it becomes with other markup (someone adds a #skip-to link on the page), it is less headache to implement with good old clicks.