scriptygoddess

1 | Frank

September 3rd, 2004 at 6:57 am

The problem with Toothpaste Addict is that probably a double minus sign was automatically converted in a single mdash by a text parser like Smarty.

In fact, this is probably the least hacky and most optimal way to send the buggy IE browsers an alternate stylesheet. You can also target the different IE browsers individually, like send IE5 a separate stylesheet from the one you send to IE5.5 or IE6. Check out this write-up.

2 | GG

September 3rd, 2004 at 8:46 am

Yeah, this is excatly how we get the Firefox logo to show up on the top of the page for IE users over at RepTIDE.

3 | J.A.S.O.N.

September 3rd, 2004 at 10:36 am

4 | Valerie

September 6th, 2004 at 11:04 am

Okay so what about css? If I need it to do one thing for Mozilla and another for IE, what do I do? I know this is a bit unrelated, but I can't find this anywhere else so far…

5 | Bob S

September 7th, 2004 at 11:11 am

I just noticed this trick used on Wikipedia. Checking the Wayback Machine, I see they've been using it since at least July. I heard it here first, though!

Must resist temptation to show IE users picture of Goatse Bob. ("If you weren't using IE, you wouldn't see this". Ooooh, soooo tempting.)

6 | Bob S

September 7th, 2004 at 11:27 am

Valerie,

The tendency is that IE works one way, while Everything Else supports W3C standards. So don't think in terms of what you want to do in Mozilla, but try to focus on Web standards, and use this trick to fix IE-specific problems.

Remember, nobody designed this trick; it's a rare instance in which Microsoft's lax ideas of how broken HTML should be interpreted can, by total coincidence, be used to make pages work on both categories of browsers (i.e., IE and Everything Else).

If I understand CSS correctly, what you can do is define your normal (W3C-compliant) stuff first, then use this trick to supply the IE CSS, which will override whatever preceded it.