At 05:02 PM 3/7/2006, Ben Buchanan wrote:
Conditional comments are a hack - an ugly, inefficient hack at that.
Planning for the future includes the thought "hey, when IE6 becomes
irrelevant, I'm going to have to edit every single HTML document I've
got to remove this bloat!".
My point was simply that IE's conditional comments -- and ugly they
are, no argument there -- are more likely to work as intended in a
few years than hacks like * html.
Or alternatively, some browser will come out which has a bug that
makes it read the stylesheet that was only intended for IE6; only to
render a complete mess as it tries to cope with conflicting CSS.
Exactly. I believe this is much more likely to occur with * html
type hacks than conditional comments.
We do know that the * html hack works right now and it's entirely
plausible that it will work just fine when IE7 comes out. It's
entirely plausible that some future browser will have a problem with *
html but it's also likely that IE6 will be a footnote by then so the
hacks can be removed.
I don't think hacks will be removed from most pages. The amount of
legacy crap on the web is phenomenal. Who bothers to clean up a
three-year-old archive? That's the thinking that points me toward
using hacks that will persist.
Just to give myself a little perspective, I should confess that I do
use the * html hack in my own stylesheets -- in fact it's pretty much
the only one I do use. My previous outburst was motivated more by a
desire to throw a bucket of water on someone's haughtiness than it
was to start another holy war.
Regards,
Paul
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