Posts Tagged ‘internet explorer’
IETester – the end of Internet Explorer woes?
Friday, September 18th, 2009
September 18th 2009
In the wake of RIP IE6 I got a tip about IETester from My Debugbar.
It is in early alpha but can appearantly mimic the rendering of IE from 5.5 all the way through 8.
So far so good, we will see if this will grow to be a useful tool.
CSS Hacks is bad for the carbon footprint
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
April 1st 2009
I just finished reading CSS Tip: Targeting IE 5.x, 6 and 7 Separately – Ed Eliot. It was written 2 years and 5 months ago.
I needed to find out about some code that one of our freelance web designers had put into the stylesheets of our website at work last week.
To use an example from Ed Eliot’s site
.box {
background: #00f; /* all browsers including Mac IE */
*background: #f00; /* IE 7 and below */
_background: #0f0; /* IE 6 and below */
_bac\kground: #f60; /* IE 6 only */
padding: 7px;
color: #fff;
}
Yes, I am talking about the star property hack, and underscore, escape hack.
It is different from the normal star hack in that the star is used inside the CSS style properties.
Sure, I do not mind putting in MS propriety code in my CSS – especially when it does not justify its own stylesheet.
But…
CSS hacks using browser bugs to cater for obsolete browsers is wrong on so many levels when you can use simple conditional comments.
<!--[if IE]> IE Conditional Comment: Internet Explorer <![endif]-->
<!--[if !IE]><!--> IE Conditional Comment: NOT Internet Explorer <!-- <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 6]> IE Conditional Comment: Internet Explorer 6 only <![endif]-->
If you really need to use CSS hacks to do something in CSS, then you have probably implemented it wrong.
My suggestion is to anyone who tries to cater to Internet Explorer, do use conditional comments. So what if it means another file, it will only be loaded by the browser you specify. Masochists using obsolete versions of IE (IE6 is seven years old) won’t know the difference, and seriously do not care about whether a site works fast or not. A millisecond longer load time won’t make a lick of difference to them. Users of standard compliant browsers will not care the slightest, because your code works for them. They are happy not having to download the propriety code for crappy CSS implementation that Microsoft is guilty of.
Do not let CSS hacks taint your code. It is wrong, makes the code hard to validate, confuses the heck out of people, makes CSS look very Web 1.0 and it kills puppies.
You do not want to kill a puppy do you?
