There was an interesting post to my forum I found today asking about hacks. As she pointed out, hacks are less and less popular as IE 7 gains more ground because they were often put up solely to get IE 6 (and sometimes 5) to play well with the HTML and CSS specifications. The most common hack is the box model hack which corrects for the differences in interpretation of the box model in IE 6 and standards compliant browsers. Conditional comments are also less popular now. But do you use hacks or conditional comments on your pages? How important are they to you?
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To my regret I do use hacks for the current website I’m working on for the simple fact that I want my cool stuff to display right in all browsers and I don’t want to leave IE behind because I know alot of my targetted audience will use IE. (An example of what I currently have is a drop down item menu that’s hacked for IE7)
Perfect subject. I have redone the left index page using em for fonts. For the first time I also used “list”.
On IE Explorer the print is tiny and no little “>” lead-in.
On Netscape the print is huge, and the text wraps. Ugly.
On Firefox it looks exactly like I would like it to look on the other browsers.
Very disappointing.
Is there a way??????
I do indeed still reluctantly use the box model hack and will do until I see the number of IE6 users dropping considerably more. Thank goodness IE7 is more compliant.
I no longer use hacks. Pages that I have already use or templates I use will continue to use any hacks that I used in the past.
As to the comment by Jan. The first thing to do to help alleviate the font size problems You have mentioned is to establish as base style for all of Your pages. By linking first to a base style sheet You will start out with all browsers using the same styles. Remember to use fixed values such as 10pt etc. for sizes. Then link to a style sheet using em to adjust the base size to what You want.
I have never used hacks. I just put a note on the first page advising readers to download Firefox if the page doesn’t look right to them.
I’ll still use hacks as long as a large portion of people use IE6. According to the Browser Stats at w3schools, a bit over 33% of the population still uses IE6. when that drops to, say, 10%, I’d stop bothering with hacks. This depends greatly, of course, on what type of audience your particular page attracts.