Prev | Current Page 446 | Next

Craig Grannell

"The Essential Guide to CSS and HTML Web Design"

box {
width: 300px;
}
The box model hack itself was later simplified further, to the simplified box model hack (or
SBMH), which involved using a single backslash in the second pair to get Internet Explorer
5.x to terminate the rule:
.box {
padding: 20px;
width: 340px;
w\idth: 300px;
}
DEALING WITH BROWSER QUIRKS
355
9
In a sense the opposite of the box model hack, the star HTML hack is also often seen, in
order to make only Internet Explorer see a rule:
* html .box {
background: #000000;
}
There are myriad other CSS hacks out there, but they won??™t be explored here. Not only do
hacks mess up your otherwise clean and compliant style sheet, but they??™re also not futureproof,
as evidenced when the star HTML hack stopped working upon the release of
Internet Explorer 7. Also, hacks often need overrides, as evidenced by the ???be nice to
Opera??? hack. A far better and more future-proof method is to ditch CSS hacks entirely,
instead making a totally clean style sheet for a website, and using conditional comments to
fix bugs in Internet Explorer.
Conditional comments
Conditional comments are proprietary code that??™s only understood by Microsoft browsers
from version 5 onward, but as they??™re wrapped up in standard HTML comments, they
don??™t affect other browsers, and they are also considered perfectly valid by the W3C??™s validation
services. What conditional comments enable you to do is target either a specific
release of Internet Explorer or a group of releases by way of expressions.


Pages:
434 435 436 437 438 439 440 441 442 443 444 445 446 447 448 449 450 451 452 453 454 455 456 457 458