Gunlaug Sørtun wrote:
To me a 'conditional comment' is a "constructed hack", and I see no
reason to litter anything with it, unless there's no other option.
However, those 'conditional comments' won't target any other versions
than they are set up, so they are pretty safe in themselves.
A point worth making. A valid html page with conditional comments
linking to valid css would not load that css in a valid environment.
Imagine an IE only stylesheet that is called, in one instance, by a
conditional comment and in the second, by a regular comment - but in
this instance every selector ends in a comma.
1.In terms of valid computing, the first one contains content in the
comments. The second contains extra content, but the css called by this
content 'doesn't have selectors'.
2.In terms of human readability, you can pretty much work out what those
'comments' are doing. In the second instance, a semantic filename might
make it equally clear what's going on in the special stylesheet - when
you look at it you may or may not get thrown by the commas but hopefully
their significance is pretty clear.
3.In practice, IE has no problem with either method. They make as much
of a difference due to key differences in what IE can conceivably
understand. Validity-respecting browsers will give errors for every rule
of the second method, but at least they can see everything. The only
reason the first method passes is because utterly invalid functions are
being hidden from it.
Validity is abused on both counts as far as I see it.
The psychology of the first count is that you're saying validators can't
accept browser differences, so you're duping them into thinking there
are none and hiding crucial content from the validation process.
My psychology is that what could be debated as ambiguous or just plain
wrong in the status quo of valid css coding does in fact get digested in IE.
Both of these methods rely on abusing bugs in the validation process. I
believe both would be fixed in an ideal world - but actually none of us
have suggested this because we need these methods.
The notion that IE should coherently evolve in the scope of standards at
a faster rate than the development of standards is one that has never
stood the test of time, but one espousers of the first philosophy take
for support when suggesting their methods are safer.
Regards,
Barney
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