I'm looking at tidying the CSS for a large site to optimize it and noticed that throughout there are a lot of the old underscore hacks, e.g.,
_width:200px
I've tried looking online and am having trouble getting any answer post 2010. I'm getting the data through for how users are browsing the site and what browsers they're using but was wondering if it's now generally considered safe to remove these legacy hacks from files?
The underscore hack is only applicable to IE6 and older. If IE6 support is no longer needed, then it is safe to remove all occurrences of the hack (such as the example you have) from your stylesheets as they would otherwise never be used.
Removing these hacks is recommended as IE6 usage is now minimal and keeping your code as clean and hack free as possible is to be desired.
But in the case that a user does use IE6 they should be informed that their browser isn't supported. From the HTML5 Boilerplate:
<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<p class="chromeframe">You are using an <strong>outdated</strong> browser. Please upgrade your browser or activate Google Chrome Frame to improve your experience.</p>
<![endif]-->
i suggest you simply replace your "hacks" with something like this:
<!--[if lte IE 9]>
<style>
</style>
<link />
<![endif]-->
it will give you the highest amount of control since you can control which versions use which markup.
Related
As you can see on this live demo, I have a website with two stylesheets, one for our beloved IE and another one for the normal browsers, set like this on its header:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="stylelab.css">
<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ie_stylelab.css" />
<![endif]-->
Even though I have checked many times its spelling, it seems correct but if you open the link from IE (IE v11, in my case), normal Stylesheet is loaded instead IE one.
To check easily if the other CSS is loaded, in theory, when opening the link from any IE and executing the menu (bottom right button), it has blue background.
What is missing here?
IE stylesheet has the entire normal stylesheed PLUS the additional properties needed for it to work, maybe this is wrong and shoul only have the additional properties..?
Conditional comments are no longer supported
Support for conditional comments has been removed in Internet Explorer
10 standards and quirks modes for improved interoperability and
compliance with HTML5. This means that Conditional Comments are now
treated as regular comments, just like in other browsers. This change
can impact pages written exclusively for Windows Internet Explorer or
pages that use browser sniffing to alter their behavior in Internet
Explorer.
See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh801214(v=vs.85).aspx
IE stopped support for conditional comments as of IE10.
At this point a better solution is to target CSS based on features rather than vendors/browsers. Tools like modernizr can really help you with this.
I have designed a web portal, I have made that website good looking at Firefox browser,
But when I started testing with IE, some issues which works in IE 6 may not work in IE 8,
means back ward compatability is not there in the IE.
You can check my website at cricket scores
In this scenario, which IE version do you think to consider and make my website to work normal.
Edit
As per the below suggestions, I understand that need to create the separate CSS file
corresponding to each IE version like 6, 7,8, 9 and so on in future,
if the number of CSS files increases, wont that affect the performance and loading of the web page
please advice,
Unfortunatley IE does not render things the same as Firefox and is a common problem. The best way is to do IE Specific IF statements and have IE 8 Emulate IE 7. This does require a few additional CSS files, edited for each version. Below is the generic way to have it set up for IE/FF (belongs in head). Normally IE 6 & 7 are viewed the same so you do not need to have different CSS files for them.
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/templates/dchirotemplate/css/style.css" type="text/css" />
<!--[if IE 6]><link rel="stylesheet" href="style_ie6.css" type="text/css" media="screen" /><![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 7]><link rel="stylesheet" href="style_ie7.css" type="text/css" media="screen" /><![endif]-->
You can view a site I created with this style sheet setup by going to http://www.decrescenzochiropractic.com
Tip 1: Don't even bother trying to make things look good on IE6. Make it work on IE6 if you must, but if you start trying to achieve perfection in IE6 you'll be in for a world of pain and frustration.
We have officially dropped support for IE6 on our new site; we're not even testing with it.
Tip 2: Look into using some javascript libraries that provide better cross-browser compatibility for IE. Here are some good ones:
Dean Edwards' IE7.js
CSS3Pie
Whatever:hover
Selectivzr
Modernizr
Also consider using jQuery or similar; this is a bigger jump than just compatibility, since it involves changing your coding style quite considerably, but it does provide very good cross-browser compatibility for most of its functionality.
You should use IE-only conditional comments, in the form
<!--[if IE 6]> <p>hello world of bugs!</p> <![endif]-->
This way you can load custom stylesheets, etc.
You should make your site work with all browsers.
A quick and dirty trick for IE 6 and 7 is also the star selector but don't overuse it:
body{
background-color: blue;
*background-color: red /* Only shown in IE */;
}
Fact is IE will be the most troublesome of browsers.
Traditionally, IE has not been compatible, period.
While most of the other browsers were working to be compatible with the standards coming out, MS was trying to be smarter and better than everyone else and doing their own thing. This has caused a lot of problems for many designers. A lot of design books have an entire chapter on dealing with IE's quirks.
Fortunately, it appears MS is finally starting to see the light. To Microsoft's credit, IE8 defaults to a mode that is more standards-compliant that IE7, breaking sites that targeted earlier versions of IE. And, from what I've read, they're as committed as ever to the standards with IE9.
So to answer your question, I'd try and be compatible with the later versions. That way, your site is likely to remain valid for longer. However, any good website designer will test on all the top browsers. I use IE, Chrome, Opera, and FireFox.
I think you are going about this all the wrong way.
Yes, you could create separate style sheets, and you may still have to. However, the markup on your page is absolutely atrocious. You are sending every browser that hits that page into quirks mode, and getting pages to look the same, or even function the same, between browsers when they are all in quirks mode is a chore in and of itself. Don't get me wrong, it can be done, but it takes quite a bit of duck tape and bailing wire.
You should really fix your markup, then assess your css. You can definitely make a page that looks like yours with a single style sheet, even in IE6.
in ASP.NET application, how to design the pages in such a way that they are displayed properly in both IE6 and IE8 browsers? I would like to minimise the CSS work that I need to do if there are any general guidelines to follow which will work in both browsers. I may still need to tweak here and there, but I want to reduce bulk of the work. Please let me know if there are any such guidelines.
Thanks in advance.
I have been coding a recent project and used the ie7.js script from http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/. It works marvels at fixing IE 6 to a reasonable level. Then use this block to declare your body. (This part was ripped from html5boilerplate).
<!--[if lt IE 7 ]> <body class="ie6"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 7 ]> <body class="ie7"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 8 ]> <body class="ie8"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 9 ]> <body class="ie9"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if (gt IE 9)|!(IE)]><!--> <body> <!--<![endif]-->
You can how polish up any stray css my using the respective id like this...
#ie6 .element{
//special stuff for ie6
}
The ie7.js script should save you quite a bit of time though.
If you add the following line to your section it will force compatibility mode and help minimize the amount of CSS you need to write:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=100" />
However, you probably won't get it perfect without writing custom CSS rules.
Start by making sure that basic layout of your page is working cross-browser. This can be quite trick, but the good news is that other people already did the heavy lifting for you. Just google for "one column", "three column", "holy grail" or whatever layout your are aiming for and you will find plenty of articles describing how to achieve it in any browser you want.
Starting for there, my suggestion is to code for IE8 and add hacks for IE6 when required. This should keep the hacks at a minimum since CSS that works in IE8 usually also works for Chrome, Firefox and the other decent browser.
Don't try to make your site pixel perfect across all browser, this will only drive you insane. Let your website "degrade gracefully" on the older browser. IE6 users won't care if the site don't have rounded corners or gradients anyway.
Using javascript to simulate modern CSS features in older browser is also a good idea. But I don't recommend using the ieX.js scripts. These scripts require too much CPU to run and can make your site unresponsive if your HTML is heavy.
I am getting rid of browser compatibilty issues.
so i come up with idea to load the only css according to browser.
So say if user uses IE then only styleIE.css get loaded if firefox styleFF get loaded and so on.
my question is it correct method if not what care should taken to avoid this compatibilty issues.
because when i solve issues for IE then it opens the new issue in a my stable version of FF
That is done frequently although you probably want to use a general CSS file with the shared styles and combine it with the browser dependent CSS file.
But in fact most CSS problems with different browsers can be solved without this trick and by just using the correct markup and styles...
Usually it's enough to create a stylesheet that looks well in normal browsers, and then make a IE-only supplemental stylesheet that fixes the incompatibilities and include it through conditional comments (although IE8+ is kind of OK and IE7 usually works):
<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/ie_sheet.css" type="text/css">
<![endif]-->
Since IE6 is a horrible monster from the dawn of time, which needs its own specific hacks, you can include a different stylesheet for IE6 (and lower) and IE7 (and higher; not really needed most of the time):
<!--[if lte IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/ie6_sheet.css" type="text/css">
<![endif]-->
<!--[if gt IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/ie_newer_sheet.css" type="text/css">
<![endif]-->
Other browsers parse these as HTML comments and ignore them.
See also: a more detailed discussion of conditional comments.
I use a reset stylesheet, a normal stylesheet (i.e., for all standards-compliant browsers) then IE-specific stylesheets that reference the various versions of IE. The IE stylesheets only cover the items that IE has trouble with. I use the Microsoft conditional comments for including those stylesheets, so they are not read by other browsers.
It's not morally reprehensible, but it is less than ideal.You can solve cross-browser compatibility issues by learning a little more about what is going on.
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/
http://validator.w3.org/
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html
Yes, many websites do just that.
That works just fine, the only thing to keep in mind is that, everytime your user loads a page, now the browser has to run through all the conditionals. So as long as it's not excessive (one check for each version of every major browser), nobody will notice.
Now making changes to the css if you've got even just 3 or 4 versions will be a bit of a pain, but everything has it's cost.
I've seen people doing things like this in their HTML:
<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="ie.css" type="text/css" />
<![endif]-->
Does this work across all modern browsers and is there a list of browser types that will work with that kind of if statement?
Edit
Thanks Ross. Interesting to find out about gt, lt, gte, & lte.
This works across all browsers because anything except IE sees <!--IGNORED COMMENT-->. Only IE reads the comment if it contains a conditional clause. Have a look at this article
You can also specify which version of IE. For example:
<!--[if IE 8]>
<link rel="stylesheet type="text/css" href="ie8.css" />
<![endif]-->
If you can use Javascript, there are several options:
navigator.appName
navigator.appVersion
link
Or something more robust by using a library such as jQuery.
Finally, you could use the BrowserDetect object from QuirksMode.
Once you have the browser name and version, you can then insert HTML to link to a style sheet or include other tags.
Conditional comments are purely for IE (version 5 and later). The official Microsoft documentation is here. If you are going to use them the best strategy is to conditionally include external stylesheets or javascript files after your normal includes. This means that on IE your IE-specific code will override everything else. On any other browser the code will be treated as comments and ignored by the parser.
Further to Ross' answer, you can only target the Internet Explorer rendering engine with conditional comments; there is no similar construct for other browsers. For example, you can't write conditional comments that target Firefox, but are ignored by Internet Explorer.
The way I achieve the same effect as your example above is to sniff the user agent string. I then deliver a suitable CSS file for that browser. This isn't perfect because sometimes people change their user-agent string for compatibility.
The other way to target different browsers is to utilise browser specific hacks. These are particularly nasty because they usually rely on bugs in the browser and bugs are liable to be fixed!
User-agent sniffing is the best all-round solution in my opinion.