When it arrives later this year, Internet Explorer 9 will support most of the latest decorations and behaviors in CSS3. But until then, you’re stuck with the same old workarounds for IE users.

Here’s something that might make your life as a designer a little bit easier: CSS3 Pie is a new library written by Jason Johnston that lets you use several of the latest CSS3 enhancements and still have them show up in Internet Explorer versions 6 through 8.

It creates DHTML behaviors that IE can understand, and then it controls how they’re presented. The library can be used to translate a few CSS decorations: border-radius, border-image, box-shadow, multiple background images and gradient backgrounds.

Right now, it’s just a demo, and since it uses .htc files for DHTML behaviors, it causes a serious performance hit on some versions of IE. It will likely become more useful in the future as Johnston builds it out. Follow Pie’s progress on Twitter.

Is it a good idea? On one hand, it’s just another life support mechanism for IE6. But it also gives us an easy enough fix where we can continue creating modern designs without having to worry as much about alienating those visitors stuck using browsers that don’t have proper CSS3 support.

Hat tip to Rey Bango at Ajaxian, who notes that CSS3 Pie deserves a spot on your shelf next to those other two libraries that perform similar magic tricks, Modernizr and html5shiv.

Also, A List Apart recently ran an excellent tutorial on using Modernizr to smooth the transition to HTML5 and CSS3.

See Also:

• The Solar System, Rendered in CSS and HTML
• Using HTML5 Today With Modernizr
• Handy Guide to Detecting Support for HTML5