Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 – Bringer of Furies

IE7Warning :- Contains Exceedingly Dull Techie Content

Not all that long ago, Microsoft released a public beta preview of their latest browser. From an end-user viewpoint, even at its current stage it’s quite a good browser. It’s more or less at the stage Firefox was last year, with a few other features slapped on. Okay, as soon as I installed it Outlook stopped picking up my Hotmail account, but I’m sure that’ll be ironed out before release and in my case at least can be rectified by realising that your Hotmail hasn’t been used for anything vital in five years and canning it completely.

However, idle curiosity lay not behind my download. Having had occasion to design a few ‘sites’ on the ‘internet’, it would seem sensible to check how these ‘sites’ ‘look’ in IE7.

The results would send lesser mortals insane. However, let us instead look at fixing it. Why had it broken? The site in question, theOneliner.com, the internet’s only reliable film review source, uses a table-less design for many reasons, chiefly accessibility, portability and to separate the design from the content. Yay, web standards! I remember feeling very Zeldman on completion of the CSS layout based site looking all clean and lean in Firefox, Opera, et al. And like a monkey had vomited on the page in IE 5, 5.5 and 6. The process of patching it up for inferior yet popular products began.

Which is as close to black magic as coding can come, using a variety of IE bugs to fix other IE bugs. Chief weapon amongst these is the Tan hack, or Star-HTML hack, a nonsensical CSS rule that sensible browsers ignore but the idiotic, drooling IE engine goes off and renders anyway. This meant you could slap these on the end of stylesheet to patch up IE’s shame. Fabby!

IE7 lumbers onto the scene. With laudable sentiments, the design team decides to support CSS more fully. Part of this involves becoming a sensible browser and ignoring the Tan hack, as a sensible browsers would. Fabby!

Except, and this is a pretty damn big except, in Microsoft’s infinite wisdom that despite some progress, they’ve still not fixed the underlying errors in the display of the content, thus making a complete tit of things again, and taking away the most common recourse to fix it!

YOU HATEFUL, IDIOTIC MORONS! YOU USELESS, INCOMPETENT WANKBADGERS! YOU GODAWFUL, LADYRAPING IMBECILES!

Ahem. This upset me a little. Still, in my case at least there’s a quick, ugly fix. It involves adding stuff to your HTML rather than CSS, mind, which is sort of entirely opposite to how this CSS malarkey was supposed to work, but what the hey. Conditional statements to the rescue!

First copy and paste all of the Tan hack statements into another file, remove the “* html” from the start of them and save ‘em somewhere. Open your now borked HTML file, and stick the following into the <body> section:

<!–[if IE 7]>
<style type=”text/css”>@import url(“fixfornumptiebrowser.css”);</style>
<![endif]–>

Right then. Everything that isn’t IE7 should superciliously ignore this, but IE7 should process all of the directives it needs to patch it up. Fabby!

Bright sparks might ask “why not remove the hack completely from the CSS and just use conditional statements?”, and they’ve got a point, especially if you don’t care about supporting IE5 for the Mac which has it’s own distinct and completely different set of glitches. I said a quick and ugly fix, didn’t I? File that one under ‘for future exploration’ for now.

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Published:
5.9.06 / 9pm
Category:
Tilting at Windmills
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