Hi people, I just wondered if people had an opinion about the
alternative of using hacks/conditional statements, php or js to
account for browser variation?
My opinion is that browser variations have to be fairly large to bother,
but of course: designers often do, so we need methods for making
/designers/ happy :-)
Targeting browser *versions* to account for minute variations can be a
time consuming and never-ending task, as new browser versions add in new
variations (of the kind that may throw some designers into a spin) all
the time. So better draw a line somewhere in the past - a couple of
years back -and leave the new browsers alone - apart from sending
bug-reports.
In most cases it is browsers variations in, and lack of, support for
parts of the CSS we use that cause (mostly visual) variations. So to me
it becomes logical to *handle all CSS related variations in CSS*.
- Old browser versions are "static" - nothing changes, so we can target,
hack or ignore them at will, as long as we make sure our methods can't
affect new browsers - ever.
- New browser versions should be given a fair chance to grow, so they
should never be version-targeted, hacked or ignored. Instead they should
be served the correct styles for what they're supposed to support and
act upon, preceded by any intermediate styles we are sure they may
respond positively to while waiting for their proper and complete
support of the correct styles.
"Correct styles" can be a somewhat moving target if we want to make use
of the "latest and greatest", so may be a good idea not to throw too
much of that into regular production for clients. The "latest and
greatest" is better reserved for personal and/or test sites, while
waiting for standards and browsers to "stabilize".
Note that browsers can spoof or hide "User Agent" etc., and that this
may be done for a lot of reasons not related to your site. So targeting
them through browser/version detection is highly unreliable at best.
Browsers can not spoof or hide their degree of CSS support - at most
support can be turned off or in part overridden by user styles - so all
points to that it is always best to *handle all CSS related variations
in CSS*.
regards
Georg
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