serverside CSS makes baby Jesus cry
Now, I’m not the happiest webdeveloper when I have to use CSS hacks to achieve crossbrowser compability, but really, this is definitely not the way to get rid of such hacks (via), for all the reasons outlined in the comments on Stylegala’s similar piece “No More CSS Hacks”.
Browser Detection (yuck) + Dynamic Stylesheet (eek) = Headache-Inducing Waste Of Time / Effort / Money.
As a user, if I’ve had to change my browser’s UserAgent string to get into some bad (likely IE-only) website earlier in my browsing session, the last thing I want to see on the next website is a stylesheet being served as if I was really using the faked browser’s rendering engine. And as a webskivvy, what I’d really hate to maintain is a mess of serverside if/else/switch statements and string manipulations when all I want to do is change a colour or the position of some box.
…For Tim’s sake, dudes (an “Architect for MSN Web Experience” and the founder of Stylegala, of all guys!), haven’t the dark days of JavaScript browser detection taught you about checking for capabilities instead of UA strings? Is nostalgia for the 90’s taking over your sanity?
one response
Those guys probably never heard of Conditional Comments. A great way to get rid of all the Internet Exploiter 5+ troubles. ;)
First you optimize for W3C-compliant browsers (FF, Opera, KHTML), next you create a seperate CSS file just for Idiotic Exploiter users, done.
Examples: here and here. Oh, and here, too.
cu, w0lf.
#1 fwolf — 2005/11/14 at 19:40
Your words