Web Forefront

In a recent blog entry by the Internet Explorer team you see the headline: Call to action: The demise of CSS hacks and broken pages. In it, they "ask that you please update your pages to not use these CSS hacks". Assuming people would update the millions of pages out there that use these CSS workarounds, the irony in all of this, is that these "CSS hacks" -- as described in their post -- are there to deal with their "hack", in the form of Internet Explorer 6.

These described hacks have been introduced by most CSS designers, to deal with the proper rendering of pages in Internet Explorer. Such is the case, that removing these declarations has no effect on other browsers -- namely Firefox and Opera -- in displaying a page correctly, it is only in IE that they are of use.

There are a wealth of documents around the web describing these and other shortcomings in IE -- such as handling of <object> tags, images and other CSS issues -- compared to other Browsers, which have lined up more throughly to standards. A very concise and up to date overview : Criticisms regarding support of open standards in IE

Kudos to the IE7 team for adopting a more standards based design, but an unfortunate approach, asking the developer community to correct issues that exist solely to deal with their previous versions of IE.