I'm wondering whether to put all CSS filters in a separate IE-only stylesheet, meaning an extra HTTP request, or just leave them in one big style sheet. Even though the filters are ignored by non-IE browsers, I imagine they would still have to be at least identified. Is there noticeable overhead for this?
As far as I'm aware, no. Because the filters do nothing in any other browser, the only performance hit is almost immeasurable in the amount of time it takes to load the line of CSS and figure out that it does nothing. There's no reason to worry about it.
If you're really concerned about it, you can put the filters in a separate IE specific CSS file and wrap the <link> element in a conditional IE statement.
I would go with a comment-style include of an IE specific stylesheet(s). They would not even be loaded for non-IE browsers and load tie of all characters is probably the best saving here. I wouldn't worry about and extra http call or two for version specific sylesheets, but as always that will depend on your actual site structure and content, e.g. stylesheet sizes.
e.g.
IE 7 or over:
<!--[if gt IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ie7-and-up.css" />
<![endif]-->
or
IE 6 only:
<!--[if IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ie6.css" />
<![endif]-->
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.
Good day,
I want to apply two different CSS codes to fix some font-rendering issue (faux bold) in IE8, the latter cannot recognize all the font-family if they've got the same name, instead it only recognize the first font-family, so i'm attempting to use conditional comments to fix that :
First code is for older versions of IE (including IE8) :
<!--[if lte IE 8]>
<link href="IE8fonts.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<![endif]-->
Second one is for IE9, IE10 and all non-IE browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari...), none of them has this faux bold issue :
<!--[if IE 9 | !IE]><!-->
<link href="fonts.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<!--<![endif]-->
I know the first code is correct (or maybe not :p) , so i want to know if the second is correct too, because i don't get what i expect when i change compatibility mode in IE, certainly there is something wrong in the condition [if IE 9 | !IE]
I also want to know the correct order (if there is one) to put those two conditional comments.
Please help me with this because i'm kind a newbie in anything related to compatibility :/
You could apply the css for IE9+ and other browsers first, and then apply the conditional comment for IE8 or less, so the rules for font-family in fonts.css would be overridden by the rules in IE8fonts.css, if the browser is less than or equal to IE8. This way you can avoid complex and unnecessary conditional comments.
<link href="fonts.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<!--[if lte IE 8]>
<link href="IE8fonts.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<![endif]-->
Hope it helps.
Conditional comments are an IE specific feature. Other browsers just treat them as normal comments. Remember that an HTML comment starts with <!-- and ends with -->. Hence <!--[anything]> is the beginning of a normal comment, and non-IE user-agent will ignore anything after that until the next occurence of -->. On the other hand <!--[anything]><!--> is a full comment and non-IE browsers will process whatever is after that.
So I suggest you use:
<!--[if gte IE 9]><!-->
<link href="fonts.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<!--<![endif]-->
From the point of view of a regular HTML parser (non-IE), this is two regular comments enclosing a link element.
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.
Here's the situation.
I made three style sheets for each of the three pages I am currently working on. One that works in IE8/Safari/Opera/Firefox. One that works in IE7 and one which if used alone works on IE6
I tested everything on www.xenocode.com/browsers and that sites' IE 6 and 7 emulators.
3 I used a variation of the article's suggestions for a way to make all the sheets work. (In the section:
http://www.thesitewizard.com/css/excludecss.shtml
The problem is that while it calls up the proper css for IE 8 and IE 7 online (It works just fine directly off my computer), it can't seem to call up the code for IE6 properly online causing the layout to be messed up in IE 6 (Or at least the emulator on xenocode.com.
Is there a better method?
(Can't show you the full page, due to my client being adamant about not showing it until the project is finished.)
Assuming you are using browser conditional statements...
I would check that the emulator your using is able to interpret browser conditional statements. If unsure you could always disable all other stylesheets and link normally (using the link tag) to just the IE6 stylesheet and then test
You want to have IE6 specific CSS? Also, please consider using Microsoft SuperPreview to locally see how your design looks in various versions of IE6.
You can use these css selection tags for the specific Browser version for IE.
<!--[if IE 6]><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/ie60.css" /><![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 5.5000]><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/ie55.css" /><![endif]-->
<!--[if lt IE 5.5000]><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/ie50.css" /><![endif]-->
http://rafael.adm.br/css_browser_selector/
I love this thing because it lets me define granularly all the changes I want for different browsers / operating systems.
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.