How Long is your IE Stylesheet?
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
Here’s an interesting question. I guess we’ve all got different tolerance levels and methodologies based around Internet Explorer – sheer economics precludes a full day’s investigation of every cross browser issue for some businesses. So how many lines does your current IE stylesheet have?
For anyone who doesn’t know what I’m alluding to, its when we use conditional comments to target Internet Explorer (either en-masse or by version) to fix those lovely little anomolies we’ve grown to love in our own special industry fashion. Using conditional comments is a far superior way to dealing with these bugs than the dark and soul-degrading option of CSS Hacks. IE7 saw a few CSS Hacks come back to bite high profile standardistas when sites suddenly fell apart because several exploited browser bugs were fixed.
So how many lines are in your IE stylesheets? For example, on this site, although admittedly its a reasonably simple layout, my current IE6.css file has 14 lines of which 8 are selectors and declarations. The likely suspects in my IE6.css file use width, padding and a font-size for code. I’m of the mind to use this stylesheet sparingly after all measure of enquiry (or a sudden time crisis) has led me to no other alternative. I also only place the very exact rule that needs to go into that IE6 fix. As yet I haven’t had to utilise an IE7.css file.
