This is a buggyfill (fixing bad behavior), not a polyfill (adding missing behavior). That said, it provides hacks for you to get viewport units working in old IE and Android Stock Browser as well. If the browser doesn't know how to deal with the viewport units - vw
, vh
, vmin
and vmax
- this library will not improve the situation unless you're using the hacks detailed below. The buggyfill uses the CSSOM to access the defined styles rather than ship its own CSS parser, that'S why the hacks abuse the CSS property content
to get the values across.
Amongst other things, the buggyfill helps with the following problems:
- viewport units (vh|vw|vmin|vmax) in Mobile Safari
- viewport units inside
calc()
expressions in Mobile Safari and IE9+ (hack) vmin
,vmax
in IE9+ (hack)- viewport units in old Android Stock Browser (hack)
The buggyfill iterates through all defined styles the document knows and extracts those that uses a viewport unit. After resolving the relative units against the viewport's dimensions, CSS is put back together and injected into the document in a <style>
element. Listening to the orientationchange
event allows the buggyfill to update the calculated dimensions accordingly.
The hacks use the content
property to transport viewport-unit styles that need to be calculated by script, this is done because unsupporting browsers do not expose original declarations such as height: calc(100vh - 10px)
:
content: 'viewport-units-buggyfill; width: 50vmin; height: 50vmax; top: calc(50vh - 100px); left: calc(50vw - 100px);';
Note: This buggyfill only works on stylesheets! viewport units used in
style
attributes are not resolved.
Note: The buggyfill can easily trip over files host on different origins (requiring CORS) and relative URLs to images/fonts/… within stylesheets. #11
After loading the buggyfill from npm (npm install viewport-units-buggyfill
) or bower (bower install viewport-units-buggyfill
), it has to be required and initialized:
require('viewport-units-buggyfill').init();
If you're - for whatever reason - not using a package manager, include the script as follows:
<script src="viewport-units-buggyfill.js"></script>
<script>window.viewportUnitsBuggyfill.init();</script>
To engage the buggyfill with hacks, pass them in at initialization:
var hacks = require('viewport-units-buggyfill.hacks');
require('viewport-units-buggyfill').init({
hacks: hacks
});
To exempt certain stylesheets from being processed, the attribute data-viewport-units-buggyfill="ignore"
:
<link rel="stylesheet" src="file-to-ignore.css" data-viewport-units-buggyfill="ignore">
<link rel="stylesheet" src="file-to-process.css">
viewport-units-buggyfill
exposes the following API:
var viewportUnitsBuggyfill = require('viewport-units-buggyfill');
// find viewport-unit declarations,
// convert them to pixels,
// inject style-element into document,
// register orientationchange event (and resize events in IE9+) to repeat when necessary
// will only engage for Mobile Safari on iOS and IE9+
viewportUnitsBuggyfill.init();
// ignore user agent force initialization
viewportUnitsBuggyfill.init({force: true});
// reduces the amount of times the buggyfill is reinitialized on window resize in IE
// for performance reasons.
viewportUnitsBuggyfill.init({refreshDebounceWait: 250});
// This enables abusing the CSS property 'content' to allow transporting
// viewport unit values for browsers with spotty support:
// * vmin in IE9
// * vmax in IE9, iOS <= 6
// * calc(vh/vmin) in iOS < 8 and Android Stock Browser <= 4.4
// * all of viewport units in Android Stock Browser <= 4.3
//
// To engage these hacks, you need to load the hacks file as well:
//
// <script src="/path/to/viewport-units-buggyfill.hacks.js"></script>
//
viewportUnitsBuggyfill.init({hacks: window.viewportUnitsBuggyfillHacks});
// update internal declarations cache and recalculate pixel styles
// this is handy when you add styles after .init() was run
viewportUnitsBuggyfill.refresh();
// you can do things manually (without the style-element injection):
// identify all declarations using viewport units
viewportUnitsBuggyfill.findProperties();
var cssText = viewportUnitsBuggyfill.getCss();
In CSS you can declare fallbacks to be used by the buggyfill's hacks:
.my-viewport-units-using-thingie {
width: 50vmin;
height: 50vmax;
top: calc(50vh - 100px);
left: calc(50vw - 100px);
/* hack to engage viewport-units-buggyfill */
content: 'viewport-units-buggyfill; width: 50vmin; height: 50vmax; top: calc(50vh - 100px); left: calc(50vw - 100px);';
}
The buggyfill emits the event viewport-unit-buggyfill-init
before initializing and viewport-unit-buggyfill-style
after applying the fixed styles to the document. The events are dispatched on window
and may be used as follows:
window.addEventListener('viewport-unit-buggyfill-init', function() {
console.log('getting lost in CSSOM');
});
window.addEventListener('viewport-unit-buggyfill-style', function() {
console.log('updated rules using viewport unit');
});
Warning: Including stylesheets from third party services, like Google WebFonts, requires those resources to be served with appropriate CORS headers. You may also need to be aware of the fact that relative URLs within those stylesheets are NOT resolved, possibly leading to missing fonts and images.
- adding events
viewport-unit-buggyfill-init
andviewport-unit-buggyfill-style
(#63 by redaxmedia, #62)
- changing Internet Explorer detection from Conditional Comments to UA sniffing - (#57 by dillonlucente, #43, #40)
- fixing CORS importer to respect
data-viewport-units-buggyfill="ignore"
(#48)
- fixing init for IE8 and below to avoid exception due to bad CSSOM (#46, #47 by zoltan-dulac)
- fixing generated
<style>
element to maintain highest precedence (#36) - fixing the preservation of !important rules (#44, #45 by mderazon)
WARNING: Breaking Changes (and a Merry Christmas to you, too :)
- not engaging the buggyfill on iOS8+ anymore (#19, #23, #27)
- also engaging buggyfill for WebViews in <iOS8 (#30)
- fixing stock Android browser behavior of viewport units when changing breakpoints
- fixing
content
hack breaking in Opera Mini (because it actually inlines the content everywhere) - fixing
rule.cssText
throwing an Error in IE (not reproducible, whatever) #21) - remove separate CSS content and behavior hacks and merge them into one. This is a backward compatibility breaking change! The only acceptable way to specify viewport-unit rules to a non-supporting browser now is
content: "viewport-units-buggyfill; width: 20vw;"
(#20, #25) - removing need for initialization options
behaviorHack
andcontentHack
, passinghacks
will suffice (#20, #25) - adding IE11 to the list to fix its
vmax
support (#31) - adding
<link rel="…" data-viewport-units-buggyfill="ignore">
to prevent specific stylesheets from being processed (suggested in #11)
- fixing
bower.json
(… narf)
- fixes IE9 and Safari native way of calculating viewport units differently inside of a frame. Without this buggyfill, IE9 will assume the
100vw
and100vh
to be the width and height of the parent document’s viewport, while Safari for iOS will choose 1px (!!!!) for both. - fixes IE9's issue when calculate viewport units correctly when changing media-query breakpoints.
- adds
vmin
support for IE9 (instead ofvm
, IE9's equivalent to vmin) andvmax
support to IE9 and 10. (Note that this will only work when initializing withviewportUnitsBuggyfill.init({hacks: window.viewportUnitsBuggyfillHacks});
) and adding theviewport-units-buggyfill.hacks.js
to the page afterviewport-units-buggyfill.js
.
.myLargeBlock {
/* Non-IE browsers */
width: 50vmin;
height: 50vmax;
/* IE9 and 10 */
behavior: 'use_css_behavior_hack: true; width: 50vmin; height: 50vmax;';
/* WARNING: this syntax has been changed in v0.5.0 */
}
- adds the ability for viewport units to be used inside of calc() expressions in iOS Safari and IE9+, via the use of the
content
CSS property. This seems like a good compromise sincecontent
is only valid inside::before
and::after
rules (as a result, it is not recommended use this hack inside of these rules). (Note that this will only work when initializing withviewportUnitsBuggyfill.init({hacks: window.viewportUnitsBuggyfillHacks});
) and adding theviewport-units-buggyfill.hacks.js
to the page afterviewport-units-buggyfill.js
.
.box {
top: calc(50vh - 100px);
left: calc(50vw - 100px);
/*
* Here is the code for WebKit browsers that will allow
* viewport-units-buggyfill.js to perform calc on viewport
* units.
*/
content: 'use_css_content_hack: true; top: calc(50vh - 100px); left: calc(50vw - 100px);';
/* WARNING: this syntax has been changed in v0.5.0 */
}
- Using the above hack one can also add support for vmax support in Safari for the older iOS6
- Adds support for viewport units inside of IE's
filter
property (a.k.a. Visual Filters). - Added debounce initialization parameter, if it is desirable to not have IE9+ fire the polyfill so many times on a resize event.
- fixing browser detection to include UIWebView - Issue #7, tylerstalder
- fixing cross origin resource problem with CSSOM - Issue #6
- fixing multiple competing media-attribute-switched stylesheets - Issue #5
- fixing double initialization and call of
reresh()
without being initialized - Issue #3 - fixing
<br>
s caused byinnerText
by usingtextContent
instead
- fixing unhandled empty
<style>
elements - Issue #2
- adding
force
option toinit()
- fixing the handling of non-iterable CSSRules - Issue #1
- optimizing generated CSS (by grouping selectors)
- adding browser sniffing
- Initial Version
viewport-unit-buggyfill is published under the MIT License.