I know after reading a headline like that you’re all heated and ready to battle. I, like you, am all about the lightest, most efficient HTML and CSS I can write. By efficient I mean it’s standards compliant, accessible, SEO optimized, speed optimized and all that other elite, ninja, guru mantra type of stuff. However, it seems the place where I find myself most at odds with my fellow developers is the discussion over the best way to address IE’s faults.
Up to the point of this writing, I have yet to find a compelling argument to stop using IE hacks in my main stylesheet. First of all, let’s get something out of the way… all of the solutions are hacks. Your boilerplate and your conditional comments are hacks. Deny it all you want, but any code you have to add to target a specific browser is a hack. If it wasn’t a hack you would write your code without it and all browsers would behave the same. Also, CSS validation doesn’t matter. Your boilerplate and your conditional comments may validate, but that means absolutely nothing. You don’t get better search engine rankings, your site is not more accessible and it doesn’t load any faster.
My IE hacks are better than your boilerplate and your conditional comments
I know after reading a headline like that you’re all heated and ready to battle. I, like you, am all about the lightest, most efficient HTML and CSS I can write. By efficient I mean it’s standards compliant, accessible, SEO optimized, speed optimized and all that other elite, ninja, guru mantra type of stuff. However, it seems the place where I find myself most at odds with my fellow developers is the discussion over the best way to address IE’s faults.
Up to the point of this writing, I have yet to find a compelling argument to stop using IE hacks in my main stylesheet. First of all, let’s get something out of the way… all of the solutions are hacks. Your boilerplate and your conditional comments are hacks. Deny it all you want, but any code you have to add to target a specific browser is a hack. If it wasn’t a hack you would write your code without it and all browsers would behave the same. Also, CSS validation doesn’t matter. Your boilerplate and your conditional comments may validate, but that means absolutely nothing. You don’t get better search engine rankings, your site is not more accessible and it doesn’t load any faster.