Comments on: Microsoft wants WebDesigners to de-hack their CSS

By: finite

finite — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 09:30:08 +0000

Stuff like this makes me glad that I don’t have to design websites for the general public anymore. Microsoft users? Screw em.

That said, next time I find myself in the unfortunate situation of having to code for IE, I will make use of the IE conditional comments thing. Looks much cleaner than ye olde css hacks.

By: nebjak

nebjak — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 23:21:34 +0000

Ie is “Bull Shit”

By: Doug Clifton

Doug Clifton — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 03:33:42 +0000

Kevin, a site and the CSS that defines it, is rarely this simple. And when you alter the main design, you have to go back and make sure each of your “cascading” fixes for each of the flavors of IE are also updated. MS, as usual, throws a monkey wrench into every designer and developer’s daily grind. It reminds me of Javascript code where you are forced to check for each of the major browsers, and then check for versions, until your code works across the board. Think of the hours lost, the cost alone of this nightmare that standards are meant to address in the first place. Think of how much farther along the Web would be if it wasn’t for these constant road blocks…

By: Kevin Yank

Kevin Yank — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 04:39:20 +0000

Look more closely at the code I propose. I’m not suggesting you should rewrite your entire style sheet for each version of Internet Explorer you wish to support.

Each style sheet would contain only the CSS tweaks required to adjust your main style sheet for a specific version of Internet Explorer (or below).

So, if you have your site’s main style sheet in main.css, but Internet Explorer 7 required your navigation bar to be given relative positioning to work around a bug in that browser, then ie7.css might just contain this:

#nav {
position: relative;
}

If, in addition to this, IE 5.5 required a fix for the buggy box model in that browser, say by giving it a smaller width, then ie55.css might just contain this:

#nav {
width: 100px;
}

You see, the bulk of your CSS code remains in main.css, and the individual Internet Explorer version-specific files contain surgical tweaks required by those browser versions.

In effect, this is just like using a CSS hack, except both your CSS and markup code are considered valid (IE conditional comments validate as normal (X)HTML comments). Additionally, all of your browser-specific tweaks reside in separate files, rather than being mixed in with your CSS code using ugly (and non-forwards-compatible) hacks.

By: Daniel Nicolas

Daniel Nicolas — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 17:08:17 +0000

Amen. Fixes.

By: Griffith

Griffith — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 16:49:04 +0000

Point made *edits*

By: cliche

cliche — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 15:37:12 +0000

“CSS hacks made for IE”

We call them fixes. If they didn’t break it, we wouldn’t be fixing it.