Avoiding CSS Hacks for Internet Explorer
I wrote a small piece for Drew McLellan’s brilliant online advent calendar, 24 Ways to Impress Your Friends. You can read and comment on it, if you’re so inclined.
Hi, my name is Kimberly Blessing. I'm a computer scientist, Web developer, standards evangelist, feminist, and geek. This is where I write about life, the Web, technology, women's issues, and whatever else comes to mind.
Comments (1)
I would’ve commented over at 24 Ways, but I found this late and comments were closed.
There’s another option that no one there mentioned: no hacks… at ALL!
The point of hacks is to get sites to look about the same in every conceiveable browser, or to preserve some authorial control over a page. This was a cute fantasy back in 1997, but in 2006 it’s downright silly. It is silly to try to control exactly how your page looks in every browser.
I’ve been doing about 50% of my web browsing lately on a Palm T|X – it has a 480×320px display and gets any kind of CSS float or positioned element wrong. Most sites look better if you turn off CSS altogether. Sometimes I’ll kill images just so pages render more quickly.
Good semantic markup will win out over schmanciness every time. I think that over the next few years we’ll see a trend towards simplicity again, with more single column layouts, minimal stylesheets, large fonts when specified, and images that are more content than decoration.
If you are sanguine about your site not looking the same in every (or any) browser it makes avoiding hacks that much easier. Your web sites are going off to college now. You just have to let go.