Comments on: One Year Ago | CSS Hacks

By: Nate K

Nate K — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 14:10:47 +0000

Personally, I haven’t used them for quite some time now. The last time I used them was on a project built by someone else - for a corporate site that used a box model hack.

I don’t like them - and don’t plan on using them. I will find other ways to get the job done (that will be semantically correct and valid).

IF hacks HAVE to be used - at least manage them separately in order for easy fixes or upgrades when the browsers change.

By: Andrew Faulkner

Andrew Faulkner — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 14:23:54 +0000

IF hacks HAVE to be used - at least manage them separately in order for easy fixes or upgrades when the browsers change.

An excellent suggestion, Nate. Do you mean by using a seperate stylesheet?

By: gareth

gareth — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 16:02:12 +0000

I find that i very rarely have to use css hacks.. what are people doing to have to use them? on the very odd occasion, when deadlines are tight I use conditional comments.

By: Johan

Johan — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 18:08:59 +0000

You can use either IE conditional comments to serve certain CSS rules to target a specifc IE WIn version (IE5+). Though many designers and coders dont use them often unless to add the hasLayout
property (in short when an element has no dimensions set like width, height you get trouble as in CSS bugs).

IE and hacks

Star html Selector Bug for IE7-

Some examples
css hacks

eg * html #container{

}

Other hacks which could be used and are considered save. Though are rarely used.

Advice: avoid hacks at all costs that rely on parser bugs in browsers.

Some advanced CSS3 selectors which are not understood by ALL browsers can be used to target a specific browsers eg IE7 or Opera and filter out others. These hacks do NOT rely on parser bugs in browsers but are at the same time not really handy (not easy to remember) and maybe not future proof. Eventually other browsers could catch up and be able to read them too.

Examples

IE7
For Opera (CSS queries:
Eg @media all and (min-width: 0px)

By: Fredrik Wärnsberg

Fredrik Wärnsberg — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 22:58:17 +0000

Hacks are sometimes needed. For example the * html hack can fix some slight issues with IE6. As long as you’re not importing completely different stylesheets I see no problem at all using smaller hacks to make your site look good across browsers. And really, for 2-3 additional/modified rules, I think that a * html hack (I think you can use +*html for IE7, correct me if I’m wrong though) is a better solution than using conditional comments, at least if you document the hacks you’re making with comments in your css-file.

By: Kabari

Kabari — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 06:11:22 +0000

For small IE problems I’ll use a hack, why not? But generally if there is list of problems, more than 1 or 2, I just work around it. An object of CSS is to add more simplicity and flexibility to our designs anyway, so working around small bugs isn’t tough.