Explanation
In this class, the only relevant use is checking support for CSS properties, but there's more to the site than just that. First, there's a news page that list new features. It doesn't seem to get updated too often, though, so I'm not sure what determines if a new feature ends up on that page or not. Second, you can select any browser versions and compare main features as well as what is or isn't supported. Finally, the search result page returns any uses of the keyword in other languages besides CSS and related MDN references.
Specific Uses
- The most obvious use is checking whether a certain feature is supported enough across browsers to be worth using. For the most part, you just need to pay attention to the overall percentage in the top right and the few main browsers in the left columns.
- Some included browser versions are ahead of what the currently used, stable version is. Therefore, you could use that as one way to find out about new features as well as what's being deprecated. I don't really know how common deprecation is in web development though.
- You can use the varying search results to learn about other uses of your keyword besides CSS, and you may even find something you need. Some results link out to more information on MDN as well.
- There is a clickable link in the hover box of all of the browser version results which brings you to a separate website for testing the feature on that specific version. You do need to sign up for this other site, but if you do, I assume this is a quick and useful way of testing.
Properties
- hanging-punctuation allows certain punctuation, like quotes, to exist outside of an element so that all of the text lines up. I believe hanging actually breaks the reading flow worse because it feels like the non-punctuation lines are indented, but I'm sure there are important use cases. I feel like it should be more supported because of those use cases, but it's only available on Safari, and even then it's not fully supported.
- font-family is the way that you change fonts in CSS. You can specify families, as you might assume, but you can also specify fonts in that family. I wanted to look at this one because I feel like changing fonts is a core functionality of anything related to text editing whether it's a direct application or indirect styling. However, it actually wasn't supported in early browser versions, and not at all in IE. Maybe there was some other way back in the day I don't know about, but it's still an interesting lack of early support.
Summary
You may not use everything this site has to offer, but not everyone might use the site for the exact same purpose, so having some varying functionality is good. It is an extremely clean and easy-to-use site as well. In addition, seeing other browsers from around the world is kind of fun.