When working on very large websites i often have one base CSS and one for each unique page that contains styling only needed on that page (to limit filesize). It would be neat if i could put all the hacks for a page in the same file, instead of one massive IE-CSS-file with every hack for every page.

But i do agree with most people that hacks should be avoided as much as posibble.

Though, there is one hack I occasionaly resort to and that’s the clearing float hack (http://www.positioniseverything.net/easyclearing.html). I could just use clearing divs but that would mean adding an extra element to the markup.

So, I would rather extract the hack to a separate css (@import, whatever you choose), than to add something extra to markup (which is still a hack).

Your best bet, as stated above, is to find out what works and use that - seek out solutions that won’t require hacks in the first place. Then, when you have no where else to turn - you may have to resort to hacks.

Hacks might not be ‘cool’, but me having a useful, functional, profitable site is ‘cool’. So I shall remain with hacks.

While we may not be proud of using hacks, sometimes a few here or there can get projects across the finish line.

I am a firm believer in condition comments. I am using asmall one on my own website currently. I still await the days when I can create a stylesheet without the hassel of different appearances, but, untill then I will resort to conditional comments and if all else fails hacks.

One thing that annoys me though is when designers expect the design to look exactly the same in different browsers and use hacks to achieve this. Why bother? One should be trying to get it to look great in all browsers, not identical.

As you point out, we spent more time perfecting the details of a site rather than working on new clients and bringing in more $$$.

I see conditional comments as a less-evil version of a hack. To me, it’s no worse than having separate style sheets for separate browsers, and less redundant. A conditional comment is at least formally supported somehow, and less likely to break in the future; whereas a true hack is really just exploiting a bug and can cause problems down the road.

I recently did a project where everything worked fine in the major non IE browsers and all i had to do was a seperate css for ie6.

It only had 6 lines in it.

I compared this to when I first started CSS, where there were hacks everywhere.

I think with experience you can learn how to deal with problems without using hacks. But also more importantly you code defensively, so you dont have to resort to them at all.