Broken pages & CSS layouts part 3
The only way I can see such hacks causing problems is if IE7 is only half fixed so that either it doesn’t see the hacks but still needs them do to shoddy style rules handling or so that it gets the rules right so that it doesn’t need the hacks, but still reads the hacks anyway due to improper selector rule handling. If both the style rules and the selector rules handling are fixed, there’s no problem, right?
I suppose it’s therapeutic to give everybody an outlet to complain about Microsoft as a corporation. Unfortunately there’s the whacko calling them “capitalistic” as if that’s a bad thing. I thought the problem was when companies *abuse* the system. Oh well.
I wish the signal-to-noise ratio was a bit higher, but between the noise there’s been plenty of good discussion about better ways to handle this problem in CSS.
I think a lot of us agree that display: none would be a more universal way to address the quirky treatment of legend. Since IE’s handling doesn’t technically violate the specification, we should fix it for ALL browsers who handle it IE’s way, not just for IE as a conditional comment would do.
With all due respect to the IE team (and I’m obviously addressing the developers here — not Bill Gates himself), I think we either need more testcases (like the legend element on Slashdot) or a copy of IE7 in our hands. Hacking CSS is a practical consideration, not some sort of science.
I often use the child selector to avoid ‘real’ rendering bugs in IE5/6. Rendering differences are a reality and are something designers and developers needs to advise their clients about.
I’ll be continuing to use the child selector to get around IE5-6 bugs that have been fixed in IE7. And so far it looks like that I’ve dodged a bullet by implementing it in the past for bugs that IE7 seems to have fixed.
So the advice should sound more like; “Only write workarounds for bugs and not for rendering differences.†And make sure your fix is CSS compliant. Remember, your pages will look differently from browser to browser to expect otherwise is folley.
How about you just make IE 7 ignore these hacks like other ’standards compliant’ browser? IE 7 sounds like a job creator… conditional CSS is a total PITA.
Play with the sample code that is posted above by adding some background colors to each element. I think you will agree that IE6 (and IE7?) handling of the legend tag is ugly. If you specify a legend in IE, the background color of the fieldset “escapes” the grouping frame and looks very ugly. In Firefox it stays inside the frame. IE’s interpretation may be within the spec but it does not yield nice looking web pages.
