concept Modernizr in category jQuery
This is an excerpt from Manning's book jQuery UI in Action.
A more thorough discussion of polyfills, including how to use Modernizr to detect native features without having to write them yourself, is in appendix F.
Modernizr is a library that does exactly what we’re looking for: it detects HTML5 and CSS3 features in the user’s browser. It takes the guesswork out of testing for features. With Modernizr, instead of writing your own test for <input type="date"> support, you can check the Modernizr.inputtypes.date property.
You can download either a development or production version of Modernizr from http://modernizr.com/. The development version is perfect for development, as it has every check that Modernizr uses. But each of those checks takes time, and doing every check has the potential to take a long time—especially for users with slower browsers. Before using Modernizr in production, it’s a best practice to create a production build with only the checks that you need. For your purpose, you need two checks: Input Attributes and Input Types. Figure F.1 shows Modernizr’s download builder with these two checks selected.
Figure F.1. Modernizr’s production build tool at http://modernizr.com/download/. The two checks we need for polyfilling HTML5 elements are Input Attributes and Input Types.
Select additional check boxes if you need them in your application, but the input attributes and types are all you need to polyfill HTML5 elements using jQuery UI. Now that we have Modernizr in place, let’s look at the polyfills jQuery UI makes possible.