Scott Boms

On Hacks and Supporting IE7

I definitely feel like I’ve done something right in that I spent very little time on Monday filtering through the site’s stylesheets and found I had only two rules to break out to a separate stylesheet (using Conditional Comments) to fix a couple rendering problems with the latest Internet Explorer 7 beta. Two lowly hacks, nothing more.

Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. browser visits
Browser stats for wishingline.com

I suppose the ease of which supporting a newer browser with improved standards support is mostly due to my decision to give a lower grade of support to older, discontinued browsers such as IE 5 for the Mac and IE 5.5 for Windows which have only accounted for around 1% of the total visits to the site since it’s launch last May.

Had I chosen to enhance the support of those older browsers, it’s likely that the number of hacks required to provide them with the same or a similar grade of support would have also increased… well… beyond two.

On a side note, the design and usability folks at Microsoft should be taken out and smacked upside the head for the bloody awful UI in IE 7. Really.