molly.com
Wednesday 21 December 2005
star html poll comments
This page is to take comments on positioniseverything.net’s poll regarding * html implementation in IE7.
Filed under: general
Posted by: Molly | 15:28 | Comments (99)
Anyway, I was having a bit of trouble with peekaboo ie bug yesterday and not knowing what was the problem found out about peekaboo through these sites I searched…I found the holy hack and star Html work arounds…but also noticed something very interesting…if i nested the icluded file between and html tags the file became visible…even if the and tags were’nt within a and tags therefore the table never shows and the included file picked up exactly the css style I coded and its positoning…not sure if this is a good thing or not but seemed to work in this one instance.. would be nice if others (much better at this than I)tested it out to see what they thought. So I am not even using the holy hack on peekaboo now… just surrounding my included files with those tags and I am now not having any issues…
]]>At first I thought it would be crazy to drop the star HTML hack, but this discussion has changed my mind… It has to go… ]]>
If you are forced to use a CSS hack for some reason, you should place it in a separate CSS file and wrap it in conditional comments. It may be a bit of work now, but you will reap the rewards later.
“While conditional comments are an excellent way targetting errant IE versions, for existing sites this would mean editing the html files to add them in, when previously we’ve normall edited our single css file accordingly.”
It’s a small amount of code and a small price to pay.
Here’s a part of my code (remember to replace the curly braces with the HTML ange brackets):
{!–[if lt IE 7]}
@import url(ie_5-6.css);
{![endif]–}
Easy, simple, clean. Very easy to copy and paste. You need do nothing further with the HTML, as you can now place all of your hacks in an IE-specific stylesheet.
I’ve been using PHP to put my pages together anyways, so all I needeed to do was to edit one PHP file to add this globally.
I’m amazed many people are still manually typing in the parts of the webpage that are common to every page. I stopped doing that long ago – I found a webhost that supports PHP, and got rid of the problem of having to manually edit every page a long time ago.
But if you’ve got multiple pages, go ahead and add the conditional comments to them anyways – it may be a “lot” of work now, but it will pay for itself later.
“And what of sites built using complex CMS systems with multiple page templates?”
ANY good webpage design, including CMS systems, will have common elements in one place, not in may places! There should be a master template that the other templates derive their base code from. If not, it needs a redesign anyways 
.
What happens if somebody needs to make HTML changes to the header or page layout? Don’t tell me you’ve never had to make such changes before! Even CSS can’t do everything. If it did, we’d never use HTML.
You ought to read about the ant and the grasshopper (it’s a short children’s story). It’s a story with a good point: It is much better to do a lot of work now and be ready than it is to be lazy now and have to scramble to fix everything later.
http://www.dltk-teach.com/fables/grasshopper/mstory.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper
I agree with Alison that a true CSS control stucture would be better than using parse bugs. At least IE has conditional comments like
which allows loading of an IE specific stylesheet that can override a previous stylesheet. If expression detects the version, the stylesheet can be version specific.
Then there’s Dean Edwards’ IE7 effort to leverage Javascript to fix IE 5’s and 6’s (and presumably 7’s) CSS bugs and limitations which is perhaps the better way to fix bugs instead of using hacks if having a single stylesheet is your goal.
]]>While conditional comments are an excellent way targetting errant IE versions, for existing sites this would mean editing the html files to add them in, when previously we’ve normall edited our single css file accordingly. And what of sites built using complex CMS systems with multiple page templates?
I’d rather IE not have any parsing bugs all too, but that’s probably a pipe dream. What I’d really like to see is a form of conditional comments that works WITHIN the css file.
]]>
I use IE Conditionals to do all my IE-only styling, so I won’t be affected by the loss of the root node selector. I have been rather pessimistic on IE7 fixing CSS issues, so I’ve been using instead of … But I figure, if they do what I expect, then I won’t have to change a darn thing, and if not, then I’ll be happy to go change everything to
Time to add more to the mix….
I’m a little confused about the concerns about the as-written Holly Hack
* html selector {
height: 1%;
}
being interpreted. I understand that if the selected item is an immediate descendant of an absolutely positioned or floated element (or a table cell? haven’t tried) it could cause problems, but IE 6 properly interprets this as “height: auto” when it comes to layout boxes. I’d assume that IE 7 would do the same.
Not to say that other uses of * html would emerge unscathed, but hopefully this observation cuts down on some of the concern regarding rework.
In terms of the fact that this hack is disappearing, we can only blame ourselves for assuming/hoping that a bug would never be fixed, or would be fixed at the exact same time the issues requiring it were resolved. Conditional comments have been around since IE 5, and although their emergence into the CSS developer limelight is fairly recent, it doesn’t excuse us for pretending that the current state of affairs would remain forever.
Oops, that should’ve read ‘interprets this as “height: auto” when it comes to layout in regular, undimensioned boxes.’
For the record, I am well aware of what a sucky browser IE 6 is. The nature of the browser coding I do, however, involves coming up with bulletproof styles that will work and play well with any valid, non-global CSS our clients may put on the page (for their branding, ads, etc.). This has led me to embrace a minimalist view, and to dump CSS hacks altogether. If something requires a hack (most of which are ways of disguising certain rules from certain browsers), I simply won’t use it or will find a different workaround.
There are a few IE-only styles I use, vended by an IE-only stylesheet, but these are mainly of the “cursor:hand;” variety, which stroke IE the way it likes to be stroked. (It’s an unruly beast, however, and frequently bites even when you’re feeding it and being nice.)
With all due respect to the brilliant Holly Bergevin, CSS hacks are a complication, not a simplification. In the voodoo world of IE/CSS, less is more.
I’m not so into CSS design as many of you are, but I’m giving a personal opinion:
my wife is a web developer dealing with CSS and XHTML and I see her using a lot of hacks to make things work both in IE6 and FF.
For me it’s quite difficult to understand all of the things and reasons of this, so I guess that making IE more compliant to the standard CSS beavour is better for all of us…
Of course now we have to reinvent a way to discriminate between IE6 and IE7, but I think for the world is better to support CSS than to support hacks
Simo
FYI: Cascading Style Sheet Compatibility in Internet Explorer 7
Using a method (the Holly hack) that relies on the expanding box bug to turn on haslayout seems to me like a fairly nasty way of giving something haslayout in IE, wouldn’t setting style=”zoom: 1;” be a nicer way of doing this? This method also result in haslayout being true but without affecting FF.
The “* html” hack is what helps me make my CSS websites look good in every browser.
As it stands right now, my sites look perfect in Firefox, Opera, IE6 but are messed up in IE7 because this hack doesn’t work.
Here’s the problem – CSS is simply not really ready for layout. It’s a great theory, but a bad reality for complex stuff. Not only IE but other browsers all have bugs, problems, hacks and so on needed. Even the beloved FF isn’t fully compliant with the spec.
If you insist on using CSS for layout, then you have to accept that IE or no IE there will be fragility, hacks, breakadges and so on as new browser versions are released. You have, in effect, turned the browser int a UI API – and liek all fo thos eyou have bought yourself all the maintenance problems related to that.
I can’t believe you guys ask this question.
Quote:
[The root node selector has long been used to create rules that only work in IE. The general pattern would be to write rules that would match in all browsers first. Then..]
How about no one cares about the holly hack, and microsoft browsers behave like everybody else?
The question shouldn’t be “Should IE7 continue working the same way?”, it should be “Should IE7 at last not require special code?”
Oh, and also, customers will of course be charged for modifications, at least partially. The code was made for IE6, and worked there. Since when were the behaviour changes a company “features” in their product the responsibility of coders? The bill is always footed by the customer, who in turn can complain to M$. Incompatible upgrades never come free. That’s the key: compatibility. Either to the previous version, or to the standard.
The Star HTML hack/filter should disappear solely because it’s a stupid parsing bug. And the underscore hack/filter too. According to Microsoft, they *are* going away.
So what do we do with ‘designers’ like Kurt above who have invested deeply in the hacks/filters? I think we should send them a book or links on good design, Inform them about Conditional Comments, convince them to change careers
.
Being an amateur web builder/designer, I have only used the star html hack once; to get around IE’s non-support of the min-height property. If IE7 supports CSS the way the Jan 31 06 article (Tonico’s post above) promises, most legitimate uses of these hacks will/should cause no problems. They will just be ignored.
As for IE7beta2 breaking sites, ITS BETA! Send bug reports to Microsoft IE team. They really want to hear about them.!
I’m with Microsoft on this one.
Conditional comments are a safe, future-proof way to work around old, buggy browsers.
They require separate stylesheets for old browser hacks: I think this is a good thing. We should all be moving to standards compliance, and now that Microsoft is, we’ve got a good chance to get there. Separating old browser hacks from the rest of our code can only help highlight the extra time and work it takes supporting non-standards compliant browsers.
There will be work to do during the transition, but there will have to be at some point if Internet Explorer is going to become standards compliant. I wish it had come at version 6 in 2001, instead of version 7 in 2006, but we should put the work in now so that, in future, we can actually move forward.
I’m a big fan of the Holly hack as it’s a nice simple way of doing things and whilst learning anything new is a pain … really, we should have been using conditional comments.
Lot depends on how you design, when I started css I had * html all over, but now I rarely use it, and the times I do it’s rarely critical.
If IE is to ever become a css happy browser something has got to give.
Besides, given IEs proud history of bugs is there anyone here who thinks there won’t be some thing similar to Hollys in there?
Dang man, when I found that Holly hack, it cured my blues. But you know what? It don’t cure the browser. Losing it is only losing an analgesic for our original pain – poor compliance in IE.
Basically, we shouldn’t *ever* have to rely on hacks. I tend to design for firefox/Safari and then fire up old IE to see what I need to fix. Imagine if I could have confidence that it’d work everytime – the hours I’d save! (but which I’d charge to the client anyway, just for the memories…)
The best thing about Conditional Comments as opposed to CSS hacks is that you can also include content, such as… oh I don’t know… how about “Please for the love of God get yourself a decent browser!“
This change will, by itself, not effect me. II have not ever used this hack. Always to acheive layout-perfection in IE I have included a special IE css file through conditional comments. I do have some checking/work to be done with regards to changes in IE7, however as I said, it isn’t due directly to this hack. Frankly, anyway whining about a *hack* no longer working in an update needs their head examined as, by its very nature, a hack depends on a bug which can – and hopefully will – disappear in a later version of the software.
Please excuse my ignorance of what appears to be obvious, but please clarify what I may need to do to update “Holly-hacked” sites. Here’s my take:
1. Keep my current stylesheet(s), minus IE hacks.
2. Make a stylesheet for all versions of IE.
3. Make separate stylesheet for IE 4, 5, 6, and 7.
4. Include all IE stylesheets via CCs.
If that’s right, MS’s solution is quite a bit more complicated than the original problem (HH is 3 lines of code!). Would be nice if CCs could be done in the main style sheet.
Anyways, I’d sure like to see exactly how this is implemented. Can anyone point to a particular example of a Holly-hack to CC conversion?
TIA
Instead of wondering which hacks to leave and which to remove, why isn’t Microsoft pressured to not need hacks? Are they incapable of writing a standards-compliant browser? And any machine that can run IE7 can run Firefox as well, so why don’t designers encourage proper standards usage by not coding for IE? That way, only the people who insist on using a broken browser see a broken webpage.
Disabling any of these IE-specific “hacks” will not affect me, as I always go out of my way to avoid having to use them (in part for this very reason), even if it means some minor design compromises. But then, I’m more content-oriented than graphic-oriented, so my situation may be different than that of true graphic designers.
I am honestly NOT a Microsoft basher. I have simply grown tired of their refusal to come into compliance with standards. Hence the very opinionated response below…
If people were educated to the point where Microsoft’s failure to comply with standards was not tolerated or acceptable, then none of this would be an issue. Microsoft is sitting back and gloating about how they can break the web by NOT conforming to standards simply by virtue of their market share. Remove that confidence in market share and the problem would likely go away.
I, personally, will not hack up CSS to satisfy a non-compliant browser.
*GASP!* “But then all those people with IE won’t see your site correctly!”
So catch the browser and give the IE users the information they need to get a better browser and tell them why. I’m sorry. I know this isn’t what most people will design into their pages, but perhaps those are the same people who complained loudly about gas prices at almost 4 dollars a gallon after Katrina a while back while filling their SUV for the 2nd time that week and doing nothing to curb their gas useage.
Do NOT hack to comply with Microsoft’s broken browser. Make Microsoft comply with standards. I know this isn’t a popular idea, but the fact that they have no intention of fixing the expanding box or anything ELSE just shows their indifference. Would you accept this kind of attitude on the part of your auto manufacturer? “We’re not going to fix the steering problem. You’ll just have to adapt.”
I think not.
Hacks are ugly, and should never be used. I can do ANY layout I want, including fancy stuff like rounded borders and multi-column liquid layouts, without hacks. A lot of W3C-compliant HTML, CSS, and a little JavaScript for the rounded borders all work nicely.
a) Start by seperating layout, content, and style – good design always trumps bad hacks. It also makes changing the website and layout a LOT easier.
b) As much as possible, use CSS for layout (avoid tables) – this allows you to import an IE-specific stylesheet if need be. Also, the tables have their own problems . . . .
There are many, many tutorials all over the web on how to create good stylesheets – without hacks.
c) Use valid, W3C compliant HTML and CSS first. Adjust for IE later.
d) There are some very useful “IE7″ scripts that can help IE work better.
http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/
e) Microsoft’s conditional comments. If you MUST do something differently for IE, they are a clean, hack-free way to do it. You can import an IE-specific stylesheet that way.
NOTE: So far, I have NOT needed to create an IE-specific stylesheet yet, although the code exists for it in my website. Yes, my friends, I can do a complex layout without hacks and make it look the same in IE and other browsers.
f) NEVER expect bugs in one version to exist in the next. NEVER. Relying on bugs is VERY BAD practice.
Just like “Charles” and “Charlie,” I go out of my way to avoid hacks and come up with clean solutions to my problems. It took some work, but I’m pretty sure my website will work in any browser available (especially W3C-compliant ones) and future browsers as well. And, on top of that, seperating content, layout, and style means I can make large, sweeping changes with no problems.
Look, the hack is really not supposed to be used. It’s a very very bad practice. Besides, there is a better way to do that — conditional comment in IE is a better way to add IE only features w/o breaking any standard.
Okay, time for an update. MS has now “corrected” the expanding box bug. I quote it because MS has (of course) not completely fixed it, but has instead fixed it for only the the most obvious cases (as usual), and once you get into it a little, the NEW bugs start gnawing your foot off.
Anyway, this fix means that a box CANNOT be put into layout mode in IE7 via a height value, REGARDLESS of the method used. Holly hack or CC, “height: 1%” is a no-no in IE7. So now “zoom” is the ONLY usable way to do it, and since IE5/win does not support zoom, we will be forced to use 2 CC’s, or 1 CC and have a star/html hack inside to fork the code between the IE versions.
Furthermore, extensive testing with the latest IE7 beta shows that the layout monster is till present and ready to pounce, altho it’s true that many of the infamous bugs involving layout have been fixed (peekaboo, guillotine, etc…). But just try to make a list without paying attention to layout, or add a width to a div following a float, and you will find out that “It’s still heeere…”
I’ve been told by an MS insider that the star/html hack is definitly dead, so that seems to be it. However, the release date keeps being pushed back, so who knows what is really happening? Not me!
I don’t think they are “going slow” for the sake of a few css coders who will suffer, but rather it’s the new security “features” that they fear will “turn off” lots of clueless users who will become “unsettled” by needing to actually do things the browser tells them to do, to be “safe”.
If IE was even half as secure as FF then these draconian methods would not be needed, but they are, and I bet the focus groups are telling MS that people really hate the stupid hoops they will be made to jump thru. Just my opinion, but I’m tellin’ ya…
I suspect that many coders will now grit their teeth, and dive into the breech yet again…
…only this time, instead of adding conditional comments on top of Holly Hacks on top of Tan hacks into the CSS, they will simply rewrite every webpage to display a shiny “Get Firefox” button link in a prominent place.
(Personally, I think this would be a groovy idea. I carry a flash-memory card when I travel, and must use random computers. I now always keep the latest installers for FF and Opera on the card, so I never have to deal with the IE fiasco.)
Obviously the Tan hacks already present must stay, to keep IE5/IE6 in line, but with IE7 I fear that coders will need to learn two languages: Standards-CSS, and a perverted mutation of it that is MS-CSS. It seems obvious to me now (or is it just the paranoia?) that Microsoft has wanted to establish their own proprietary style-code for a while, and they intend to do it through the sheer weight of the presence of their browser, and unified web-language be damned.
Of course any hack is, by its very nature, a symptom of some failure somewhere. And the fact that these “hacks” are accepted practice is also a sad commentary, in general, to the present state of webcoding. One would think Microsoft wouldn’t be so quick to throw the baby out with the bath-water, but they have obviously already decided that their browser’s “Layout” model is much more precious to them than standards-compliance.
Its funny how people keep saying that using the hacks are bad practice. IMHO using IE (or any microsoft) is bad practice. (and before the flames of “its about appeasing clients and end users” starts… i know. I just thought I’d drop my light opinion.)
I agree with Dormer, if your gonna use conditional statments… make them “if ie, redirect to firefox”… or some MS-hate or something. rebirth: http://www.w3junkies.com/toocool/
Well, I’ve never used the * hack, so it doesn’t effect me one bit. I almost used it today, but that’s because I was following a demo for a CSS-based drop-down menu (something I’ve never bothered with), and there was a * hack in the demo code. What bothered me more was the change of HTC’s in XP SP2. While hunting for a fix for that (change the mime type, by the way) I found out about all these lovely changes MS is making. Just go with the CC’s guys. It was probably a better idea to begin with, and now all the star hacks you guys have used is coming back to haunt you. So, I’ll put a CC for IE and put a hack in that style sheet. I’ll leave the rest alone because my tests are showing the rest of my sites working fine in IE7, Mozilla, Firefox, and Opera.
By the way, my sites now contain a “If you are running Netscape 4.x, you are about 10 years out of date. Get a new browser. If you are running IE 5 or 6, those aren’t web-standards compliant. They’re bad browsers. Get something compliant like Mozilla (link) or Firefox (link).”
Sorry, but I can’t help laughing at all this. The merest hint of common sense would have told you that relying on a hack to achieve a result would bite you in the ass soon enough. The idea of you all running off crying to MS asking them not fix the bugs you like after years of bitching about bugs you don’t like is going to have me chuckling for years.
I couldn’t agree more with Schmoo’s comment above: Relying on a hack of this type is GUARANTEED to come back and haunt you some day. Anyone who made this choice knew what they were in for, so there is no sympathy from this corner. It IS rather funny that all these people are begging Microsoft to keep a bug they like, while clamoring for them to fix bugs they don’t like.
OH – I just tested my webpage with the IE7 Beta – guess what? My page still works, no modifications needed!
I can relax while all you hack users get to rewrite your pages
.
Using hacks, despite the article writer’s claims, is not forward thinking in any sense of the term. A true forward thinker will consider the possibility that yes, bugs do in fact get fixed, and should not be counted on to exist in the future.
The “Holly Hack” is not as crucial as the author claims. It is, in fact, very poor practice.
As I have stated before, complex tableless designs are in fact possible without any hacking at all.
Holly, you REALLY should rethink your position on hacks. Seriously, encouraging people to use them (and to tell Microsoft to continue supporting bugs) is the absolute worst advice you can give, and I am saddened that I’m going to have to deal with people who follow your advice in the future.
Not to mention all of the frustration that you are going to cause when Microsoft DOES upgrade their browser.
Folks, you have two choices:
-Follow the advice to use hacks and face a LOT of frustration in the future when browsers get upgraded.
-Don’t use the hacks and watch as your page continues to work even when browsers upgrade.
It’s quite simple and straightforward. Make your code clean and compliant, and you will be rewarded with a webpage that doesn’t need a rewrite every time a new browser is released.
Four years ago I thought there were only two internet browsers – IE and Netscape. Two years ago I started learning to make websites using MS FrontPage 2003 and, later, discovered there was FireFox and Opera. Over the past 6 months I’ve been learning to work entirely with CSS and haven’t made a new page in FrontPage. I am only now realizing how much of a pain in the butt it is trying to develop stylesheets to deal with Microsoft IE’s obvious inadequacies. In short – it’s too bad Microsoft gets away with keeping 80% or more of the world’s computer users ‘hooked’ on using IE. We’ll still need to re-hack IE 7 BUT… those of us who are tired of this must also do our best to promote the use of the “other” browsers that outperform IE. Almost all casual PC-users run what comes on their computers from the retailers… WinXP and the associated MS software. They don’t even realize they CAN download and install another browser on ther systems. They shy away from anything free due to ‘bad’ stories they’ve heard. All they need to learn is that it really isn’t hard or harmfule, and the resulting experience will end up being positive.
I feel that Microsoft is making a good decision. I was taught along time ago when I first started learning, that hacks are pointless, everytime I thought I needed a hack a friend of mine showed me the right way to do it, the more you know about CSS itself the less you need hacks for. So there was never a need for me to ever use hacks. Because of that person who pointed me in the right direction. He said hacks should only be used in an emergency as a last resort when there are no other alternatives, I never had this issue come up, and everything else got created with just full css.
Thanks for the discussion. I am learning rails and came across the holly hack in Dave Thomas and David Hansson’s code. I am disappointed in the lack of sympathy in recent blogs as people have only being coping with the inadequecies of Microsoft! If IE7 now behaves properly then all well and good – so it *** should! But Microsoft should accomodate the hack in IE7 for legacy sites because it was of their making.
Cheers!!
This makes me want to cry. I had a problem wher in standards compliant browsers a menu list would it snugly into a graphic behind it, making it look like buttons and in IE I had to use the tan/holly/*html hack to add an extra couple of px into the bottom margin. Now I’ll need to rework the whole dang thing.
Thinking that the web development company should shoulder the burden for updating existing sites when a new technology comes out is beyond retarded.
The clients pay the bill for that.
Seriously, what’s the statute of limitiations? Soon as the site is signed off on and released, that’s it. Something new comes out after that, not the Web dev’s problem.
Having said that, we should be on top of the changing trends in technology and we owe it to our clients to be as prepared for these types of things as much as possible.
I’m already coding standards-compliant XHTML which is /supposed/ to be more forwards compatable. I’m doing my part. I’m doing more than most are doing.
But just drives me crazy to think that we OWE the client updates to their site when IE 7 comes out. What about a site developed in 2005 when IE 9 comes out? You still ‘owe’ them all the fixes?
[quote]We’ll still need to re-hack IE 7[/quote]
Because you made the MISTAKE of using hacks in the first place.
There are plenty of legitimate browser-detection methods out there, such as Microsoft’s conditional comments. There is NO excuse for having to use hacks.
[quote]This makes me want to cry. I had a problem wher in standards compliant browsers a menu list would it snugly into a graphic behind it, making it look like buttons and in IE I had to use the tan/holly/*html hack to add an extra couple of px into the bottom margin. Now I’ll need to rework the whole dang thing.[/quote]
Use conditional comments, so IE6 and below use it and IE7 does not. You will save yourself a lot of pain.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/overview/ccomment_ovw.asp
It appears that so far, the hacks that are supposed to make things “easier” are atually causing more pain. Hence why they are really horrible. Candy coat them as much as you want, at the core they are still ugly and painful.
Learn to take a little bit of pain when you first design a website, and use hackless code. It will save you a LOT of pain later.
Hacks should never be future proof. Microsoft should ignore any bugs that happen in pages that use hacks, and be as standards compliant as possible. If you need to target or bypass internet explorer use the future proof way:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/overview/ccomment_ovw.asp
Actually I find it quite insane that a lot of you want Microsoft to keep ANY parsing bugs. Especially since I recognize a lot of you as people advocating Firefox since it is “standards compliant”, and IE is not. Are you afraid that you cannot complain about IE? There is a standards compliant way of applying height: 1%; in Internet Explorer 7, and the same goes to IE 5 and 6:
* {height: 1%;}
This style sheet will not be applied to other browser, and it will not be applied to IE 8 and newer.
last comment was this:
{{!–[if lte IE 7]}}
{{style type=’text/css’}}
* {height: 1%}
{{/style}}
{{![endif]–}}
replace {{ with a left bracket and }} with a right bracket. HTML get stripped here.
I was always wary of the holly hack, using it very seldom, only if there was no other workaround – and my fears have proven to be correct.
The only time I’ve been forced to use hacks of any type were when working within the confines of other software – such as hosted bulletin boards that don’t allow you to edit the or CMS systems with bloated html markup. But there were other occasions when the page design fell apart in IE because of expanding box or peekaboo bugs, and then you have no choice but to use a hack.
While conditional comments are an excellent way targetting errant IE versions, for existing sites this would mean editing the html files to add them in, when previously we’ve normall edited our single css file accordingly. And what of sites built using complex CMS systems with multiple page templates?
I’d rather IE not have any parsing bugs all too, but that’s probably a pipe dream. What I’d really like to see is a form of conditional comments that works WITHIN the css file.
All the hacks should be abolished. I understand that pragmatically they’ve solved problems, but moving forward, they are nothing more than a crutch.
I agree with Alison that a true CSS control stucture would be better than using parse bugs. At least IE has conditional comments like
which allows loading of an IE specific stylesheet that can override a previous stylesheet. If expression detects the version, the stylesheet can be version specific.
Then there’s Dean Edwards’ IE7 effort to leverage Javascript to fix IE 5’s and 6’s (and presumably 7’s) CSS bugs and limitations which is perhaps the better way to fix bugs instead of using hacks if having a single stylesheet is your goal.
“But there were other occasions when the page design fell apart in IE because of expanding box or peekaboo bugs, and then you have no choice but to use a hack.”
If you are forced to use a CSS hack for some reason, you should place it in a separate CSS file and wrap it in conditional comments. It may be a bit of work now, but you will reap the rewards later.
“While conditional comments are an excellent way targetting errant IE versions, for existing sites this would mean editing the html files to add them in, when previously we’ve normall edited our single css file accordingly.”
It’s a small amount of code and a small price to pay.
Here’s a part of my code (remember to replace the curly braces with the HTML ange brackets):
{!–[if lt IE 7]}
@import url(ie_5-6.css);
{![endif]–}
Easy, simple, clean. Very easy to copy and paste. You need do nothing further with the HTML, as you can now place all of your hacks in an IE-specific stylesheet.
I’ve been using PHP to put my pages together anyways, so all I needeed to do was to edit one PHP file to add this globally.
I’m amazed many people are still manually typing in the parts of the webpage that are common to every page. I stopped doing that long ago – I found a webhost that supports PHP, and got rid of the problem of having to manually edit every page a long time ago.
But if you’ve got multiple pages, go ahead and add the conditional comments to them anyways – it may be a “lot” of work now, but it will pay for itself later.
“And what of sites built using complex CMS systems with multiple page templates?”
ANY good webpage design, including CMS systems, will have common elements in one place, not in may places! There should be a master template that the other templates derive their base code from. If not, it needs a redesign anyways
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What happens if somebody needs to make HTML changes to the header or page layout? Don’t tell me you’ve never had to make such changes before! Even CSS can’t do everything. If it did, we’d never use HTML.
You ought to read about the ant and the grasshopper (it’s a short children’s story). It’s a story with a good point: It is much better to do a lot of work now and be ready than it is to be lazy now and have to scramble to fix everything later.
http://www.dltk-teach.com/fables/grasshopper/mstory.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper
[...] Det är en lång lista på fixade buggar i IE 7’s rendering av CSS, men några uttrycker tveksamheter kring i vilken utsträckning de är fixade, det kan hända att det bara funkar i ganska speciella fall. Se kommentarerna till Star-HTML-artikeln på Molly Holzschlags webb. [...]
Forgive me if I’m being naive – I’m just now trying to teach myself all this CSS stuff, but the obvious question which pops into my mind is ‘why can’t Micrsoft just develop a standards-compliant browser?’ Is that stupid?
What is the Holly Hack anyways? Never used it never will… I have, however, used the star HTML hack to force IE 6 to “fix” the different margin size implementations…
At first I thought it would be crazy to drop the star HTML hack, but this discussion has changed my mind… It has to go…
putting up a website url at this time…
Anyway, I was having a bit of trouble with peekaboo ie bug yesterday and not knowing what was the problem found out about peekaboo through these sites I searched…I found the holy hack and star Html work arounds…but also noticed something very interesting…if i nested the icluded file between and html tags the file became visible…even if the and tags were’nt within a and tags therefore the table never shows and the included file picked up exactly the css style I coded and its positoning…not sure if this is a good thing or not but seemed to work in this one instance.. would be nice if others (much better at this than I)tested it out to see what they thought. So I am not even using the holy hack on peekaboo now… just surrounding my included files with those tags and I am now not having any issues…
Uh those tags were
Okay one more time TD and /TD