Sent by Dave Silvester on 29 July 2004 14:02
On Thursday 29 Jul 2004 13:42, Zoe M. Gillenwater wrote:
> It's just a matter of personal preference. I'm a Star HTML girl.
Star-html is my preference as well. :-)
> Some folks are all about the underscore hack, and others are all about
> conditional comments. Or some combination of these.
My personal rule is that if it's CSS that doesn't validate, that is needed to
fix a bug in IE (eg. using "expression" to work around min/max width
limitations), it goes in a separate file that is brought in with conditional
comments so that good browsers are never even exposed to it.
That means I probably wouldn't use the underscore hack, since if it doesn't
validate anyway then the only way I'm bringing it onto my sites is inside a
conditional commented stylesheet, so there's not much point.
I don't tend to use multiple conditional stylesheets though. I'll do a
generic "iefix" stylesheet if I have to, and use normal parser filters to
give the different IE versions the values they require, if they aren't all
the same.
This also has the added bonus that the conditional comments not working with
multiple IE's installed doesn't affect me, since I only have the one iefix
stylesheet and one conditional comment for all IE versions, rather than a
different conditional comment for each IE version.
I think it's a fairly neat way of doing it, for now, and it keeps the worst IE
hacks (eg. the non-validating ones) out of my main stylesheets.
> And others are just anti-hack entirely.
I don't like to use hacks, but when a browser is as broken as IE is, what
other choices are you left with - other than limiting your options across the
board and making rather plain looking sites in order to not come up against
any IE problems? Or, using superfluous markup in places where box model
problems are encountered so that all browsers end up being treated like IE
5.0.
It's all very well being anti-hack - I'm "anti-hack" too, but it seems a bit
idealistic and unpractical.
Now, this is not a rhetorical question - I'm asking in all seriousness:
How is it realistically possible to build pure CSS websites that are
graphically driven (eg. designed by a professional graphic designer) that
work well and look more-or-less the same cross-browser without employing any
kind of hacks to work around IE's countless bugs and limitations?
I've encountered a few "I don't use hacks" people in the past, but I get the
impression they may never have had to build a graphically intensive website
in pure CSS. Or do they have some special secret that I'm not aware of?
All I know is that IE is seriously broken, and while I hate to use hacks more
than I absolutely have to, when you're forced to deal with something that's
already completely broken, what other choices are you left with?
Cheers,
~Dave
--
Dave Silvester
Music Technology Junkie
Web: http://www.mu-sly.co.uk/ (XHTML+CSS version finally on it's way!)
Email: sly at mu hyphen sly dot co dot uk
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