I believe that conditional comments within CSS should be discussed more so, than simply pushed aside just because the W3C and others don’t agree, as I feel people in support of such a feature have valid points.

However, I don’t feel this post’s comments section is the place, so perhaps the IE team (or those over at WASP) could start a new post entry, with the aim of ironing out the pro’s and con’s in one place?

The reason being, I feel that an IE BETA is the perfect place to trial it. If it works out, it should be included in the main build, if not, it can be removed before the final product is released.

I am in complete support of W3C recommendations, but I do feel that just because they reject the idea of CSS CC, that the idea shouldn’t be put to bed.

As far as I know, the W3C have no active role in syndication XML mark-up, RSS, ATOM, etc (please correct me if I am wrong here) but look where that has gone.

While it would be great if all browsers supported the recommendations to the full, I think history has shown this isn’t the case, nor will it be for a long time coming, be it via lack of support, or just bugs (known and unknown).

I’m quite reluctant to use conditional comments in my source files because it unnecessarily complicates the maintainability of my (multilingual) project.

The dilemma is that every additional stylesheet is required to be localized to the languages that my website is going to support. Now you may wonder what on earth there is to localize in a stylesheet that only accommodates browser-specific CSS hacks.

Well, guess what, multilinguality isn’t always all about translating messages/resources, there’s also the issue with the directionality of a writing system. Not all scripts are written from left to right, there are also some that are written from right to left (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew et al), or from top to bottom (Chines, Korean, Japanese) or even bottom to top (Mongolian).

Anyway, before I digress: the directionality of a script  determines whether my content column has to float left or right, and whether my sidebar must have a margin-left or margin-right property set. So if I want to correct, for instance, the box model issue of IE 5.5 in a separate CSS document, then I’m required to provide the same stylesheet adjusted to RTL layouts.

To be honest, I absolutely don’t care about what rendering issues Opera 5/6/7 or Mozilla 1.0 had, because their respective users should update their browser on a regular basis. If the most current version of the said browsers still haven’t rectified a specific rendering bug, then I’m willing to employ some CSS hacks as long as it doesn’t get fixed.

Bottom line: Are you against bug trackers? Have you guys ever considered giving us that much transparency? Doing so would let us plain ahead so we can do our hacks before we aren’t surprised in the final release through trial and error.

I’m not proposing open-source, we wouldn’t be able to fix the bugs ourselves, but if we could AT LEAST track what is being fixed and what is being purposely ignored, you can do a lot of good for the web…

I think MS is afraid of that if pages will break in IE7, users will blame it on the browser (and not on some CSS hacks they never even heard of) and switch to another browser. Maybe that’s what it’s all about.

Neverthless do I appreciate the efforts to make IE7 more standards compliant.

One little thing: everybody should have used conditional comments instead of polluting their style sheets with some harmful hacks. Even two years ago, it could have been clear that there will be an IE7 some time in the future. One should *never* use hacks that are not future proof!

Conditional comments like the above are still going to break IE in the future. The risk is that eventually, a version of IE down the road will include the bugfix that caused the need for the special margin-top rule for IE6. Yet, the rule will still be applied and the search-box above will be positioned 1.6 em higher than it should be.

Likewise, writing a conditional comment specifically for IE6 won’t work either because we don’t know if the bug will carry through to IE7 because it hasn’t been released yet.

No, Microsoft, the solution to this mess is for you to fix your CSS parser bugs and match your CSS rendering to that of the other browsers.

I’d like to point out that if MS wants web developers to work with them on IE7 bugs, fixes and inconsistencies they will need to release a public beta ASAP. Any beta released should be able to run on top of the current XP install and not interrupt or overwrite previous installations in order to allow developers to easily access their IE 6 copies for testing current projects.

Overall I’m glad to see MS and the IE team moving towards a more standards compliant browser (the web needs this), but please be respectful of the hard work developers have poured into their sites and the hacks they have to implement because it took years for MS to deliver a decent web product.

MSFT guys… Are you against bug trackers? Have you guys ever considered giving us that much transparency? Doing so would let us PLAN AHEAD so we can do our hacks before we aren’t surprised in the final release through trial and error.

I’m not proposing open-source, we wouldn’t be able to fix the bugs ourselves, but if we could AT LEAST track what is being fixed and what is being purposely ignored, you can do a lot of good for the web…

I’d also like to point out that if MS wants web developers to work with them on IE7 bugs, fixes and inconsistencies they will need to release a public beta ASAP. Any beta released should be able to run on top of the current XP install and not interrupt or overwrite previous installations in order to allow developers to easily access their IE 6 copies for testing current projects. (Not all of us can or want to run out and buy a beige box just for IE7 testing).

A quick Google search will show you how to have both versions installed… MS doesn’t want you to know this. Well too bad MS, I don’t see any harm in having 2 versions installed simultaneously.

As far as I can tell I never used hacks. Yes, IE has bugs. But except if you do the last fashion CSS trick, it is very possible to create a Design that work both for IE and other browsers without any hack. Of course it’s a little more work, but you don’t have any trouble after when things change. That what standard are for, isn’t it?

Show me a browser with good all-around standards support and we’ll talk.

I think a lot of people are still missing the point.

The issue here is the way IE renders an empty legend tag, which according to MS is not a bug but a difference in the way IE handles empty legend tags vs. the way Firefox et al renders the same occurrence.

According the the W3C standards there is no defined way an ‘empty’ legend tag should be rendered, however it is interesting that the IE teams feel it needs to display and empty character when it encounters an empty legend tag instead of doing the logical thing, printing nothing.

Furthermore, the standards on the rendering of a legend tag states the content is inline, and since MS has decided to print an empty character instead of nothing when encountering an empty legend tag it should follow that standard and use inline not block.

It is in this case that the proposal from the IE team seems ridiculous since creating a hack to work around this rendering inconsistency will require developers to pour through many line of code and layouts to find where the newly used standards in IE7 develop long standing inconsistent rendering issues.

Mostly, I think it is very good, that you are working on making the IE7 more standards compliant. I don’t think oit is a big deal, because the issue about hacks possibly not working in the future are obvious and have been referred to in countless tutorials. For my part I’ve handled it the other way around and refused to implement hacks. My motto was nice design for those that can do it, but only content for the browsers that can’t. That means that future IE7 users maybe won’t have to wonder anymore, why the design is a bit quirky. And that’s a good thing.

All these IE hacks had to be implemented because Microsoft didn’t come up with a decent web browser. Now where their share on the browser market starts to shrink a tiny little bit they want us to remove to exactly these hacks they have caused themselves. Who’s gonna pay for all this? - As you might have guessed, webdevelopers and their customers.
Microsoft - shame on you!

I hope this is just a joke! I can’t even cout up all the hours I’ve spent in the past ‘fixing’ perfectly good code so that IE can render it somewhat. Now you’re asking me to recode? Let’s put it this way: For the past 1.5 years I’ve told my developers to code corretly. The browsers that understand the code (Firefox) render it correctly. All others don’t to some degree.
This time it’s up to YOU to get your act together. We don’t code for a browser anymore. I don’t see the reason to.

But let’s look on the bright side…
I’m using PNG hacks to allow IE 5.5 + 6 to display PNGs with full alpha channel transparency. Yeah, allright, IE7 can now display alpha channels out of the box. Not only comes this feature WAY too late, but also am I NOT going to remove the hack, no matter how f*cked up PNGs will be displayed in IE7, I don’t even care if it crashes. IE 5+6 visitors are far more important to me than those few IE7 beta crackheads.

I really hope IE7 does not become the common browser.
You can’t just demand that I do the same amount of webdesign work, that I already had to do because you f*cked up all previous IE versions concerning CSS, again.

Sorry Microsofties, too sad you’ll probably never learn it.

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.

IE6 already has a “standards” mode. It is the source of these hacks.
Advice is futile when no one has shown that IE7’s “standards” mode will be less buggy than IE6’s.

My solution to this point is to make certain that IE stays out of this extremely weird mode. As it stands, “quirks” mode is predictable and quite compatible with Moz/Firefox standards behavior.

First you’re building cars with triangular tires, and people had to build roads with holes on it, and now you’re complaining your new car with round tires can not drive on these roads.

You’re realizing that there are some trivial things called standards now? You’re joking right? I hope, for the amount of time your buggy browsers cost us to write and debug hacks, you’ll pay someday!

When Microsoft is talking about standards and Microsofts commitment to them, I’ll trust them so much like I’ll do
Now to the question about deleting all the hacks that needed to be written for IE6 and before. I really appreciate the thought that IE7 will be more standard conform this question is the best proof that there is no intention to go the whole way. If there are no exact display specs are written why don’t do it the way that is standard? That IE introduced something in some Version long ago doesn’t mean that it should be stay the way it is. I understand that it isn’t easy to get this thing we call browser up to date with standards, or at least try it. But what happens if now the hacks are going to be replaced? Everyone with IE6 will look at crappy sites and think it is the fault of the web developers. Our fault. But instead it is your fault.

Can’t you wait till you release at least the public beta before requesting this….I have no access to IE7 through Microsoft.
This is not the case with legend, but I could find 200 examples where IE forces me to use hacks if I want him to work.
Yes, the following suggestion might be blasphemy for Microsoft, but I had to try.

Why not use the Firefox rendering engine, called gecko? It is Open Source, so Microsoft is allowed to use it (and don’t even have to pay for it, as it is available for free (as in free bear)).

Every Webdesigner would be happy if the IE 7 renders pages the same way Firefox does it.

Ok, Microsoft would have to open source IE 7 but as it is included in WinXP / Vista Microsoft doesn’t make any money directly with IE. I don’t think many uses will upgrade vom Windows 2000 (or whatever) only to get a new version of the Internet Explorer. So no earnings will be lost and I don’t think that the business competitors won’t have much advantages of an open sourced IE.

Also the developers of IE can concentrate on other features like improved phising protection or something like that.

In the end it sounds (well, at least to me) like a good solution. Less work for Microsoft, less work for Webdesigners.

I have wasted a lot of time finding workarounds for your standard-ignorant browser. I had to make a lot of design tradeoffs because your unability to e.g. render PNG properly.

Honestly, I do not care about the issues you got now. I won’t remove a single workaround for your buggy stuff again. You messed it up, now it’s also your turn to find a solution for it.

I still really wondering about microsoft as a whole company.
In the past, its not so long ago, Microsoft did everything to invent their own “standards” to copyright, protect and patent all their stuff and to make life hard for everybody else on this planet.
There are hundreds of examples especially in the html/webstandards area, and internet explorer was one of the worst apps ever to see the daylight and messing up things amongst web developers.

And now, all of a sudden, Microsoft asks exactly the people and the community that it has despised so very much so far for helping out and disabling hacks?
This is totally nuts. microsoft becoming and doing good for this planet after all?

I bet not. Your company is still evil, greedy, selfish and just capitalistic, with no sense of fairness, justice and humanness at all.
For the technical side of the problem: why not including an emulation mode in ie7, which could be activated to make it behave like old ie6 versions. like a compatibility mode or something.
But for the people that work at microsoft: you guys are the company, and you ppl could do much more good for your own sake and the sake of your company and this planet as whole.

Moving on…
The HTML 4.01 spec does not specify what should happen with an empty legend tag. Right. But why do you reserve a white space for an empty legend tag? If a tag is empty your browser should not print anything.

Concerning how Internet culture is evolving — or, in his view, degenerating, is not a matter of perspective.

Internet pundits often gleefully say that pampered Big Media is getting what it deserves, but the long-term social consequences may not be so humorous.

Publishers and record labels provide more than just distribution and promotion.  In a sense, they’re the venture capitalists of culture, advancing money so that a writer can take years to research a great book or a band can concentrate on creating a strong body of music.  Sure, there are lots of writers and bands who keep their day jobs and still create good work — but most of them wouldn’t mind an upfront check and some uninterrupted time.  Even the most faithful bunch of MySpace friends will probably never be able to offer them that.

Can bloggers replace traditional news organizations?  But few bloggers will ever be able to afford in-depth investigative reporting — the kind of long-term work with which the Washington Post recently uncovered the Veterans Administration scandal.

Top investigative reporters are usually remarkably focused and even obsessive individuals who want someone to pay them a salary, give them a desk and then let them loose.  And if they’re taking on big business, they also need a backer with some legal resources.  Finally, the public is still more comfortable with news that comes from trusted brand names.

The loss of quality — is really about the devaluation of the expert.  Keen argues that Wikipedia, which considers enthusiastic amateurs the equal of trained experts, is a step backward in the quality of knowledge.  It’s a point worth discussing: Wikipedia is brand new and its means of creation shouldn’t go unquestioned simply because it has climbed to the top of Google. That’s particularly true if it hastens the demise of traditional encyclopedias that have existed for hundreds of years.

The future of the Internet is also a hostage of shout culture: on one side the specter of a dumb-and-dumber dystopia devoid of quality, on the other a utopian vision in which amateurs fill the Web with free and meaningful content. Neither, of course, is really the future: we’ll end up in the middle, where certain good parts of the past may be lost but valuable new elements are gained.

While young people embrace the Web with real or virtual friends and their mobile phone is never far away, relatively few like technology and those that do tend to be in Brazil, India and China, according to a survey.

Only a handful think of technology as a concept, and just 16 percent use terms like “social networking,” said two combined surveys covering 8- to 24-year-olds published on Tuesday by Microsoft and Viacom units MTV Networks and Nickelodeon.

Talking to them about the role of technology in their lifestyle would be like talking to kids in the 1980s about the role the park swing or the telephone played in their social lives — it’s invisible.

The way each technology is adopted and adapted throughout the world depends as much on local cultural and social factors as on the technology itself.

The changes in how the youth market engages with technology is keenly followed by advertisers and content firms.

Traditional youth marketing considered opinion formers and influencer’s to be a small elite, but these days the elite has become much larger.

For parents worried about what their children are getting up to amid the wave of gadgets, little has changed in a generation.

Teenagers can be serious jerks. You don’t need research by the Pew Internet and American Life Project on cyberbullying to know that. It’s interesting to note however, that at the dawn of the 21st century, teenagers have effectively transferred their jerk skills from corporeal to virtual, launching torments once reserved for the lunchroom, school hallway and bus stop into cyberspace.

Granted, a bus stop beat down is recognizably and immediately more damaging than an acronym-rich text threat. And the research also showed that 67 percent of teens surveyed said they’re more likely to be bullied or harassed offline. But there’s a gap in information here, one that arguably encourages the casual reader to summarize something along the lines of, “Hey, this cyberbullying isn’t nearly as bad as we expected. No big deal, really.”
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Let’s face it. Once a social issue makes it as a plot point on “Law & Order,” we better start getting concerned. Now, if you’re like me, all the “L&O” franchises start to run together. But I do recall an episode where this popular high school girl got killed by this fat chick’s brother because she took cell phone pictures of the fat chick naked in the locker room and then e-mailed it to everyone or posted it on the InterWeb or whatever.

Fat Chick ended up shooting and killing Dead Popular Chick’s BFF for hanging a pig fetus on her locker. Or something like that. I don’t really remember. But it doesn’t matter. What I mean to say is this: Where is the Pew research on the connection between cyberbullying and real world harassment? Because it happens, and not just on “Law & Order.”

Maybe grown-ups want to believe cyberbullying ain’t so bad because, to varying degrees, many adults indulge in it as well. Internet anonymity grants the freedom to trash someone’s chat room opinion on politics without the fear of facing them two cubicles over the next morning. Even in the office, it allows the meek and miserable to aggressively address co-workers via cap-infused e-mails lousy with exclamation points (albeit creating permanent records they may live to regret)

Lest we continue to downplay the implications of Internet bullying for kids or adults, consider Kathy Sierra. Earlier this year, the software programmer who ran the site Creating Passionate Users closed her blog after suffering an onslaught of abuse — everything thing from childish insults to threats of sexual and physical violence. This harassment was not limited to Sierra’s blog, but infected all areas of cyberspace with items such as a manipulated photo of Sierra with her throat cut as well as the posting of her home address.