Only 3 months ago, on Modcom’s Johnies Wilshire site, we used browser sniffer Javascript to include some IE-only scripts (to handle the PNG transparency bug). Had but I only known at the time that Internet Explorer already has a simpler, better solution right there at the ready in its conditional comments.

What the hell are these conditional comments?

Well, for example, on Pizza I have some CSS that works well for Firefox but not so much with IE which requires a different bit of CSS magic. By including the code below in the Head of all of my pages I’m able to selectively include the IE CSS fix.

(also available here, for no good reason other than I think pastebin is cool: pizzabytheslice.pastebin.com/426910)

Here’s the detailed, official poop:
About Conditional Comments on Microsoft.com

CSS and IE: some easy hacks

These make use of 2 IE quirks: 1) IE is the only broswer that has anything (DOM-wise) above HTML, and 2) the IE CSS parser will strip leading underscores from attributes.

The first quirk may be exploited by using the universal (anything) selector and making a precedence rule, * html

The second works within a single rule to first give all browsers some value, then immediately give an instruction that only IE will recognize, so width tells everyone a width (including IE), but follow this with _width and all broswers except IE will ignore the new setting. IE, however, will override the earlier rule.

Here it is in action:

Sunday, April 11th, 2004Web Development & Tech