CSS hacks are the most ingenious, cleanest and most of the time only way to cope with well-known CSS bugs in IE 5 and 6 like the box model bug, the three pixel jog, the double margin bug, the guillotine bug etc.

The Slashdot <legend> example is about something not specified in the HTML spec and someone decided to target this with a CSS hack. There might be better solutions but to conclude that CSS hacks are evil, is just a sign of utmost ignorance.

I’m sure, that IE7 would have not fixed all bugs. Conditional comments are helpfull, but I prefere to provide a special CSS file for all IEs and use CSS hacks inside to separate the versions. It’s not performant, to use multiple CSS files instead and other authors may use only one CSS file (at media screen). Therefore, and because Microsoft fixes only security bugs in a major version of IE, CSS hacks are quite necessary.

Of course the child-selector cannot be used as a CSS hack any more, but what about * html? I see no reason to fix this bug, because it’s only used as CSS hack. Leave this bug and we have the choice, to change our CSS for IE 7 using the child selector for bugs already fixed in IE 7 and the star-html hack for bugs still remained.

Otherwise we have to find out a new bug for a new CSS hack - but why? We should change our CSS now. You should see the advantage of using a well known CSS hack instead of creatng a new hack when IE7 will be published.

Well, I do appreciate that you work on the IE standard issues and I do also appreciate that you try to inform web designers that this will break some and which hacks.

I would strongly suggest to create a document describing the best practice for web designers to deal with these issues.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 3:21 am and is filed under Web Developer Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.