Since it was posted on ieBlog that some existing CSS filters will no longer work on future versions of Internet Explorer (including the upcoming IE7) there has been a bit of a buzz about the disappearance of the commonly used Star-Hack. Filters have become a necessary evil in order to resolve bugs and inconsistencies with the browsers. In an ideal world where all browsers behaved the same way and were bug-free we wouldn’t need filters, however that world does not exist. At the same time filters are all about exploiting other bugs in browsers in order to get them to ignore sections of code or to parse sections that other browsers wont.
When all is said and done it is my opinion that all bugs should be fixed where possible. Which leaves us trying to find new ways to address the remaining bugs. The IE team have suggested using conditional statements within comments. This isn’t that bad an idea but I’m not a big fan of using conditions within HTML.
My suggested alternative is to add ie7 to the beginning of the CSS selector. Basically we would be replacing all bug based filters aimed at IE with a dedicated, browser supported filter. While this method is obviously not part of any CSS specification it would be tidy, easy to learn and it doesn’t throw up an error in the W3C validator. The question that remains is what everyone else thinks of this idea and whether or not the IE team would introduce it. Perhaps other browsers could add similar optional browser specific prefixes.
body {
font-size: medium;
}
ie7 body {
font-size: small;
}