CSS Hacks and IE
October 13th, 2005Suddenly there is all kinds of noise around CSS hacks, and the proposition that IE7 will make them unnecessary. (All of this noise stems from a recent post on the IE blog)
I’ve come across a half dozen or so blog posts on the “revolutionary” idea that CSS should be written without hacks. Really? These are smart people writing these things. Expounding on the fact that now we should stop using IE specific hacks.
There was never a need to use CSS hacks
Developers using these hacks were too lazy to find a clean way to write their CSS. Period. In all of my projects, the only thing I use to get things straight in all browsers is !important. And that’s not a hack. It’s in the spec. Even for old Netscape and IE mac, I just let those things degrade gracefully. No sense reinventing the wheel for browsers that are fast disappearing.
I talked about this months ago, as have many others before me. I just don’t get it. Hacks have never been a good idea, and now that IE might get it right for the first time, people have decided to learn that simple point. Silly.