These days people are dropping support for it right and left, including major businesses, major web apps, and even governments. Target ALL VERSIONS of IE ĭealing with IE 6 and below is always an extra-special challenge. Note that IE 10 and up DO NOT support conditional comments at all. gt means “greater than”, gte means “greater than or equal”, lt means “less than”, lte means “less than or equal.” The syntax to note is “!” stand for “not”, so !IE means “not IE”. Then between the brackets, “IF” and “IE” should be fairly obvious. The opening and closing tags should be familiar, that’s just regular ol’ HTML comments. This would go in your with all the other regular CSS ed CSS files. You could load JavaScript, or even use them down in the content of your site to display special IE-specific messages. Perfectly acceptable technique, sanctioned by MicrosoftĪnd remember, these conditional tags don’t have to be used only for CSS.

IE provides comment tags, supported all the way up to the current IE 8 to target specific versions, as well as greater-than/less-than stuff for targeting multiple versions at once. The tool of choice for fighting IE problems is the conditional stylesheet. Hacks are dangerous, since they are based on non-standard exploits, you can’t predict how they are going to behave in future browsers. I am of the opinion that you can handle anything IE can throw at you without the use of hacks.

But if you are worth your salt as a CSS coder, you should be able to deal with it. If you read this blog, there is a 99% chance you’ve had a hair-pulling experience with IE. I just wanted to expand it and make it more clear.

This article has been updated from an older version (originally Sept 24, 2007).

Internet explorer 8 download only