How do you target Internet Explorer in your CSS? Do you use CSS hacks, conditional stylesheets or something else?

It’s the perfect trollbait. There have been plenty of discussions about this, and I don’t mean to start a new one. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but the thing is that it’s not purely a philosophical matter. I am writing this article because I noticed there’s a lot of misunderstanding on the subject of CSS hacks.

People have been advocating three different approaches: conditional stylesheets, CSS hacks, or conditional classnames. All these techniques have their pros and cons. Let’s take a look.

What is it?

IE-CSS3 is a script to provide Internet Explorer support for some new styles available in the upcoming CSS3 standard.
How it works

If you're viewing this page in Internet Explorer, some of the elements have been rebuilt by the script in Vector Markup Language (VML), an IE-specific vector drawing language. VML supports things that are missing from IE's CSS implementation like rounded corners and blur effects.

As much as we don’t like to deal with the IE bugs, we still have to face it because your boss and visitors are still using Explorer. It gets frustrating when different versions of Explorer displays web pages differently due to the inconsistent rendering engine. We typically use IE conditional comments to fix the IE issues. But there are more ways than the conditional comments…

In this article we will quickly go through the few steps of creating a cross browser compatible font face implementation.

PIE makes Internet Explorer 6-8 capable of rendering several of the most useful CSS3 decoration features.

This script adds near-native PNG support with alpha opacity to IE 5.5 and 6. Now you can have full translucency and no more ugly grey borders! Full CSS background positioning and repeat are supporting (including CSS sprites). It requires only one line in your CSS file, and no changes to your website HTML. <IMG> tags and background images are both supported.

Use of conditional comments to target certain versions of Internet Explorer is pretty commonplace nowadays, and is generally seen as the best-practice method for including separate styles for IE.

Of course, I’ve argued in a previous article that if your IE-only styles are minimal, then you should just include them in your main stylesheet, a notion that others have echoed.

But conditional comments have some unique possibilities and quirks that maybe you haven’t considered before, or have simply forgotten. Here is an overview of some things you may not know about conditional comments.