Ashley Ford from PaperMashup is a sharing a nice tutorial about creating a set of pretty CSS3 buttons that are both cross browser compliant and degrade gracefully for non CSS3 compliant browsers. Currently, compatible CSS3 browsers are Safari, Chrome and FireFox 3+. It is worth noting that if you’re using Internet Explorer you’re not going to see all the effects as Microsoft’s browser still doesn’t support CSS3.

A button is customized by adding a chain of CSS classes. This way you can set the color and size. The button uses an overlay background image. This is useful for the gradient effect. For IE6 you’ll need to use a PNG transparency hack to make a 24 bit PNG’s render correctly. Another thing to notice is the way colors are defined. All are set using RGBA which brings much more flexibility when rendering shadows.

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