David Emery Online

IE Woe

1 August 2005

Now hopefully these promises about IE 7’s css support are true – it’ll certainly make my life easier in about 4-5 years time when we can finally start targeting it. However, a lot of people are complaining/moaning/being smug about the topic of “browser hacks”, and how they will all break hideously on IE 7.

A browser hack, for those fortunate enough who don’t know, is a way of giving a browser a different bit of css (which controls the presentational aspect of modern web pages – like how large a piece of text is, or what position an element has on the page) normally by exploiting a either a specific bug unique to a particular browser or a browser proprietary feature.

With IE 6’s current appalling css support (which is completely different to IE 5.5’s appalling css support which, again, is different from IE 5.0’s appalling css support…) most of the time browser hacks are used to make IE behave in some way, by giving it different css to Firefox, Safari et al.

So, when IE 7 finally comes out (next year, sometime. Maybe.) all the sites which currently use IE specific stuff to make it work will now be sending IE the wrong stuff, as – in theory – the problems will be fixed. There is also the small chance that some hacks will stop working, but knowing most of the inside out (the most popular relying on IE’s exposure of the “html” element, which no other browser does) I doubt they will break (too much). Hence the smug people, that haven’t used the hacks, being smug.

What I don’t get, though, is that surely the people using the hacks – assuming they aren’t using javascript to sniff for specific IE versions, which is pretty boneheaded – are just going to be in the same situation as anyone who only targeted IE 6 in the first place, which is probably 70%-80% of sites in the first place.

Of course, IE 7 will still have major css problems, without a shadow of a doubt. We’ll just have to think of new hacks to get round them…