Comments on: I Vote Conditional Comments

By: How to Handle IE6: Aggressive Graceful Degradation - Monday By Noon

How to Handle IE6: Aggressive Graceful Degradation - Monday By Noon — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:51:47 +0000

[...] other main factor to which I can attribute the success of Aggressive Graceful Degradation is that I employ conditional comments to target each version of Internet Explorer in such a way that my fixes are implemented quickly and [...]

By: Improving Your Process: The Browser Gauntlet - Monday By Noon

Improving Your Process: The Browser Gauntlet - Monday By Noon — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:42:14 +0000

[...] IETester, I will first test in Internet Explorer 7, and correct inconsistencies using conditional comments. Once things are stable in IE7, I’ll move to IE6, which is the longest stage of The Browser [...]

By: Fear not. I Have Conquered IE6, and You Can Too - Monday By Noon

Fear not. I Have Conquered IE6, and You Can Too - Monday By Noon — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 12:36:57 +0000

[...] this is (usually) a very easy fix. To force that parent element to clear itself in IE6, simply open your IE6-specific stylesheet and add [...]

By: Taking Conditional Comments Too Far - Monday By Noon

Taking Conditional Comments Too Far - Monday By Noon — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 12:38:41 +0000

[...] it’s otherwise impossible to get Internet Explorer to behave desirably. To me, they’re much more acceptable than unstable CSS hacks or extensive !important declarations. They’re much easier to maintain, and it’s the [...]

By: Jon

Jon — Sat, 27 May 2006 19:52:00 +0000

@David: I hope you didn’t take offense to what I wrote because I wasn’t trying to knock your findings. They are definitely useful and I’m glad they’ve found their way to the Web. I merely used your article as reference because it was one of the first I came across that had some legit research behind it. Again, I hope no offense was taken, and thanks for taking the time to post.

By: David Hammond

David Hammond — Sat, 27 May 2006 19:06:08 +0000

Hi, I'm the author of that blog post with the new IE7 CSS hacks. I was not specifically trying to find new hacks. I develop a set of web browser standards support tables and found various new bugs when testing Internet Explorer 7 support for CSS. The hacks were natural products of that research, and I figured I might as well publish my findings along with a disclaimer rather than wait for someone else to publish them without.

By: Jon

Jon — Thu, 25 May 2006 10:32:28 +0000

@jammodotnet: Absolutely — a stylesheet cluttered with hacks is difficult to understand at first without taking each hack and determining what it is doing.

@Fredrik: That is a good point, but when solving for IE, how would you import different stylesheets for IE6/Win and IE7?

@P.J.: It’s funny, most of the general public still see render issues as a “Firefox Problem”

@Patrick: I completely understand where you’re coming from and it would be great if all of the needs for IE6/Win hacks were replaced with a proper CSS rendering layer in IE7, but the trouble is that not everything has been fixed, and IE6/Win hacks can overlap into IE7 where you don’t want them to.

From my personal use, my IE6/Win stylesheets have usually been only a few lines tall, because like you, I have a bit of OCD when it comes to my markup. I don’t like using proprietary markup such as conditional comments, but seeing something like the Box Model Hack in a stylesheet bothers me more than seeing an IE-specific conditional comment. I’m in no way saying that conditional comments were a great solution from the start, I simply feel that they are a better alternative to spending time working out CSS hacks and destroying the presentation of your stylesheet. As I had said, I think conditional comments should be used as a crutch for Internet Explorer because they can be tailored to specific browser versions much more effectively than CSS hacks.

By: patrick h. lauke

patrick h. lauke — Thu, 25 May 2006 02:08:48 +0000

i like my markup to be clean. i can’t be bothered to taint it with browser-specific functionality (masquerading as a harmless comment to other browsers). “hey, we still haven’t got our CSS completely right, but we fixed the things you used to exploit for hacks. but don’t worry, just use our proprietary markup to work around that”. pah!

and the whole point with hacks being fixed in later versions: if the browser also fixes the reasons for which you used the hacks in the first place, there is absolutely no issue here whatsoever.

By: Pedro Rogério

Pedro Rogério — Tue, 16 May 2006 11:43:16 +0000

Of this form it is better why you can work the styles each to browser better. My congratulations!

By: P.J. Onori

P.J. Onori — Mon, 15 May 2006 17:01:32 +0000

Boy, what a pain IE has caused us. Seriously, it’s a lose-lose situation as we either need to write entirely separate CSS files for the browser or use crappy hacks that may not work in the near future.

IE has caused so much trouble for us. If only the public knew…