At 02:29 PM 3/7/2006, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
Seona Bellamy wrote:
On 07/03/06, Darren West <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I would advise against * html hacks though -
http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2005_12.html#a000598
I tend to disagree with such nonsense.
With all due respect, Lachlan, your dismissive tone is inappropriate
for a group of peers working together toward a common goal. Seona
said nothing to warrant your unfriendliness, even if you disagree
with her point intellectually.
As for your intellectual point, surely you know that the reason that
"* html" is a hack is that it assumes that the presence of one
weakness of a browser indicates the presence of another totally
unrelated weakness. These coincidental clusters of bugs vary from
one version of a browser to the next which is why so many hacks are
version-dependent. Like browser-sniffing, relying on them makes for
fragile code. You can get away with using them for the time being,
but where's the long view?
When one weakness in a browser is eventually fixed but not another,
the hack will break. Each time a browser vendor comes out with a new
version, those of us who've used these hacks will either have to
scurry around patching our hacky code or leave our old pages broken
and bleeding in the ditches of the internet. Your own language
indicates how convoluted this is:
* html is a completely safe filter to use now that we know IE7 will
not be supporting it in standards mode. Therefore, for any
IE6-and-earlier only hack, it is perfectly safe to use it. IE 7
will then receive the same styles as all other browsers. If it
turns out that the limitation is still present in IE7, the filter
will need to be modified to target IE7 as well, but until we know
for certain whether it is or not, we cannot safely target IE7.
Yah, yah, yah. Why should our code depend on combinations of bugs
occurring in the same version when we can simply filter for version
numbers and leave it at that?
Using conditional comments to work around IE's bugs is coding for the future.
(Now all I need to do is follow my own advice...)
Regards,
Paul
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