Why is backface-visibility hidden not working in IE10 when perspective is applied to parent elements?

Question

Ok, so here's another IE10 glitch. The problem is that applying perspective on parent elements breaks the backface-visibility hidden setting. Please see this fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/2y4eA

When you hover over the red square it rotates by 180° on the x-axis, and even though the backface-visibility is set to hidden, the backface is shown, at least until the 180° is reached, then it disappears. Remove the perspective property, and you'll see that it works as expected, the backface isn't visible at all, but ofcourse the 3d effect is lost.

It's possible to workaround this problem by applying perspective in the transform property: http://jsfiddle.net/M2pyb But this will cause problems in cojunction with transform-origin-z, when z is set to anything other than 0, the whole thing becomes "scaled": http://jsfiddle.net/s4ndv so unfortunately that's not a solution.

The backface-visibilty thingy is probaly a bug? If so, is there any workaound other than the one i've mentioned?

Answer 1

I came up against this glitch too and it is definitely a glitch.

The workaround is to apply the perspective transform on the child element. I updated your fiddle here: http://jsfiddle.net/jMe2c/

.item {
    backface-visibility: hidden;
    transform: perspective(200px) rotateX(0deg);
}
.container:hover .item {
    transform: perspective(200px) rotateX(180deg);
}

(See also answer at https://stackoverflow.com/a/14507332/2105930)

I think it is because in IE 10, parent element 3d-properties do not propagate to the child element. This is a known unsupported feature. Check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh673529%28v=vs.85%29.aspx#the_ms_transform_style_property:

At this time, Internet Explorer 10 does not support the preserve-3d keyword. You can work around this by manually applying the parent element's transform to each of the child elements in addition to the child element's normal transform.

So the Microsoft-recommended solution is to propagate your 3d properties yourself, manually.