[Wsuug] Conditional CSS revisited

Wed Sep 17 09:13:36 EDT 2008

Nah, didn't sound like an attack at all.

Now for starters, I haven't actually seen it employed before, I have  
seen the conditional-css site before and was instantly put off of it.  
I suppose don't knock it before you try it comes into play there, but  
oh well.

You are right that my preferred method is to have additional style  
sheets. The big motivator there for me is ease of maintenance.

This Conditional CSS method requires you to muddy your stylesheet  
with inline conditional comments, so yes, you only have one  
stylesheet but that sheet is a mess of non-standard code. When a new  
browser comes along (such as IE7) you add even more inline. When  
something changes you have to wade through this pile of declarations  
to figure out what you want.

With the method I use, I have maybe a small handful off conditional  
comment in my <head> tag that call in the patch stylesheets when  
appropriate and all of those style-sheets contain standard CSS.

With the Conditional CSS method here, you have one massive sheet that  
is loaded all the time for everyone and also has to be processed by  
PHP every time.

It just works better for me, especially on large sites, to separate  
out all of my tweaks and non-standard stuff so that I can get to them  
quickly and so that I only use them when absolutely necessary.

Jason
On 17 Sep 2008, at 09:58, Reese wrote:

> Hi Jason,
>
> Jason Wilson wrote:
>> "But when a design absolutely requires that one Web
>> browser (IE6 probably) be fed different information than all others,
>> because of known flaws in the rendering engine of that one browser,
>> then what?"
>> Then you use separate patch CSS files and call them in using  
>> conditional comments.
>> There's no reason to muddy up your CSS on every single relative  
>> declaration. The way they do it just doesn't make any sense and
>> will cause more work than help.
>
> What I'm hearing you say is that for any given rendering engine bug  
> that cannot be resolved by any other means, you'd rather muddy up  
> the markup
> and add an additional style sheet too, than add just 1 straightforward
> line to your existing style sheet. Does that sum up your position? If
> yes, how do you justify it?
>
> My apologies if that sounds like an attack, it isn't meant that way. I
> only want to understand why you've taken the position you have on this
> particular conditional CSS implementation. Earlier, you said that  
> you've
> seen this method employed but you didn't say where. Perhaps the  
> "where"
> isn't really important but I'm curious. I'm also curious what your
> impression was when you realized what that other site was doing. We
> should also specify whether they were targeting IE for some specific
> fixes only or if they had wild and zany conditionals to showcase the
> technique, viz the conditional-css.org site.
>
> Reese
>
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