CSS debates part 4
Regarding the recommendation of using conditional comments, a friend of mine recommended instead that people apply their browser-specific CSS fixes using JavaScript. That would reduce the amount of clutter that needs to be downloaded every time a page is refreshed.
First of all JS has a great amount of incompatibilities itself so this isn’t an option.
Secondly, Not only nerds or people with disabilities have JS deactivated. Look at the download counter of “No-Script” for FireFox which blocks all JS as long as you don’t add the site to your whiteliste. This is very helpful because many sites just do a lot of the ugliest stuff with JS or just disturbing things. JS isn’t HTML and shouldn’t be needed for displaying something. Forcing not only css hacks, written in css, but instead css hacks written in JS. This is not only the same stuff we dealing with right now, it is much worse.
Comment Querys? That would be exactly the same problem. Not near any standard and would require an additional skill from those who don’t know JS or other program languages. This would undermine the goal to be standard conform from the beginning. Doing this only IE can do isn’t the way to go. Everyone who designed a website should know this.
(X)HTML and CSS are different things. (X)HTML to order information and CSS to edit display information, nice formatting and all this neat stuff we love in standard conform browsers. JS is a script languages which CAN be used to do neat stuff to but shouldn’t, under absolutely no circumstances be required for a website to be displayed the way it should on its own.
Now come on everybody. The goal for standard compatibilities is not only because it sounds nice. It is because this helps web developers greatly with their work, it helps people without JS or SQL skills to do a site that works. Without having to read through the half of the web searching why one browser decides to display something completely different just for the sake of being the first who introduced it. With that point taken IE would have to do a whole lot of stuff different. JS hacks or additional non standard object are exactly the opposite way.
