samaxes

Today I stumbled on an article from 5ThirtyOne about an IE7 JavaScript library simply called IE7.

IE7 is a JavaScript library to make IE behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6

Impressive…

When you’re a web developer, you always keep running into annoying Internet Explorer bugs, so you need to hack your way around. Now with the IE7 out, a lot of the old CSS hacks don’t work anymore, and those that do still work, can’t be relied on to work in the future.

IE has a feature, called conditional comments, which could help us. As a hack it’s quite useful. IE 7 will support this too, and it even allows you to detect different versions of IE.

Here’s an example:

<!--[if lte IE 6]>
    <style type="text/css">
        @import "ie_hacks.css";
    </style>
<![endif]-->

[if lte IE 6] means “if less than or equal to IE 6″. Other possibilities are:

[if IE]

if Internet Explorer

[if gte IE 5]

if greater than or equal to IE 5

[if lte IE 5]

if less than or equal to IE 5

[if IE 6]

if Internet Explorer 6

[if IE 5.5]

will work too,

[if IE 7.0b]

as will this for IE 7 beta.

If creating standards-compliant, cross-browser compatible page layouts using CSS has you stumped, let A List Apart and SitePoint’s CSS gurus show you that way. In this comprehensive, step-by-step tute, Matthew Levine from A List Apart and Rachel and Dan from SitePoint show you how to create a slick, flexible, and solid 2/3-column layout that will stand the tests of time and evolving technology!

• In Search of the Holy Grail (3 Column CSS Layout) by Matthew Levine in A List Apart.
• Rock Solid CSS Layouts (2 Column CSS Layout) by Dan Shafer and Rachel Andrew in SitePoint.