Question

I just started working for a pretty large company and my group manages all of their public facing websites. I opened the style sheet for the first time today and have seen over 20 instances of the designers using the voice-family hack to fix an IE bug. (I don’t know why they allow graphic designers to write any kind of markup at all)

What is the general public opinion of the voice-family hack. Is it worth the time to recommend using IE conditional comments to include custom styles sheets?

Answer 1

Hacks of any kind are dangerous as they are prone to have unintended effects in future browsers (lots broke with IE7). The safe ways of filtering CSS are:

• (For IE only) Using conditional comments. These will always work on Microsoft browsers and always be ignored by all other browsers as they are within comments
• Feature targetting – using CSS selectors that are only supported by modern browsers to stop older browsers trying to interpret the rules. However the fact that a browser recognises syntax does not mean it handles it correctly. All you guarantee here is that older browsers won’t try to render these rules not that modern ones will do them correctly

Whenever possible use the subset of CSS supported correctly by all major browsers. This is improving over time as older buggier browsers drop to ignorable percentages of your users.