Sent by Hardie Ca on 4 November 2006 08:08
Does anyone else have an issue with Microsoft's conditional comments solution? I really don't want
to sound like I'm bashing here, I'm really happy that we're getting a more compliant browser from
IE, but I'm about to embark on hours of work to fix up sites for which I or previous developers
employed the child selector to get around IE's deficiencies which still have not been fixed.
I must now decide between IE's conditional comments approach, or use the triple-XXX hack. Neither of
these appeal. My main concern with conditional comments is that it pollutes my document with
proprietary, bulky markup. I employ filters to feed CSS to different versions of IE. If I followed
Microsoft's advice, I would instead have the following in the head of every one of my pages:
<!--[if IE 5.0]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ie-5.0.css" />
<![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 5.5]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ie-5.5.css" />
<![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ie-6.0.css" />
<![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 7]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ie-7.0.css" />
<![endif]-->
What about future versions? Am I to continue adding more conditional comments to the head of every
page when Microsoft rolls out another verion? IE 7.5? IE 8? IE 9? How many comments should we keep?
One of my clients is a government agency, and having moved technologically with the speed of
government, is still using static webpages for its site. To the tune of 7000 of them. There is no
SSI in the <head>, no processing directives where I could sneak in these comments. If I am to insert
a conditional comment, I will have to do so either programmatically or via a global search and
replace for each of the dozens of Frontpage subwebs they use. Either solution is unpalatable. Ever
see a global search and replace go wrong? I have, and without the ability to undo, the only option
is to do a restore.
Wouldn't it be a more elegant solution to put conditional comments in the CSS document itself?
Styles for specific browsers could be kept in a central location, with the added bonus of being
cached on the client's machine instead of having to push these comments over the wire again and
again.
Am I over-reacting to this? Does anyone else have an issue with this?
Regards,
Chris
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