Transforming the experience

With everything in place, the result is quite impressive for the minimal amount of CSS that’s required to make it happen. We’re putting most of the burden of the effect back on the browsers that support it, rather than injecting Flash or JavaScript to make it happen.

Again, the place where we chose to fully embrace CSS3 in this particular example is in the experience layer: when the photo is hovered, we’re offering an enhanced view. It’s not critical for browsers that don’t support those properties.

Users of Internet Explorer, for example, will just see a gallery of clickable thumbnails, and that’s perfectly OK. If the hover treatment was critical, then we’d need to rethink our use of CSS3 to achieve the visual experience.