I agree completely James. Targetting browsers is an inefficient waste of time in about 95% of cases. AFAIK its a big step backwards.
Having said that its hard to draw a line. We often find ourselves doing things like <div class"outer"><div class="inner"> ...and hiding some stuff inside @import to work around browser issues. In my opinion this is ok because its not really breaking the semantics or relying on a flaw in a particular browser. This like the Tantek's box model hack, midpass & browser sniffing are a bad idea they can potentially impact badly on the shelf life of your site. New browser versions & patches can mean recoding which, as James points out, is NOT the direction we want to be heading in. One big exception to this is browser sniffing to decide on whether you want to dish up Flash content or not (ala James Ellis - http://www.sitepoint.com/article/1116). My only concern with this is that if you are that interested in making your content accessible - why use flash in the first place? But if you have to use flash this browser sniffing is the lesser of two evils. Cheers Mark ______________ Mark Stanton Technical Director Gruden Pty Ltd Tel: 9956 6388 Mob: 0410 458 201 Fax: 9956 8433 http://www.gruden.com ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *****************************************************
