Back in the early days of stylesheets support for the various commands varied somewhat between browsers. Quite a number of browsers also had quirks where they misinterpreted stylesheet commands either ignoring an invalid character and processing a command that ought to be ignored or by not recognising a valid character and so not processing a command that they ought to. Of course then there are all of the stylesheet commands that early browsers didn’t support and which they therefor also ignore.

The biggest problems come with the commands that the browsers don’t ignore but which they don’t process correctly either. Clever hacks were found that made use of the quirks that given browsers had in order to get them to read or skip over commands that were needed to rectify the bugs in the other browsers.

Now that all current browsers with the exception of Internet Explorer process those stylesheet commands that they do understand properly the only current browser where hacks would still be needed is IE. The problem with using hacks for current browsers though is that the next version of the browser may not understand the same hacks or may not have the same problem in the first place.

CSS - To Hack or Not to Hack

Tags: css, hacks, ie, internet explorer, netscape, stylesheet