cons of coding css for IE, css standards Options

[macgngsta]

I dont know if this topic has been touched on, but it seems that many of the skins are optimized for MS Internet Explorer, when viewed in other browsers the layout breaks.

CSS is a powerful feature, but at the same time people should know that IE is NOT the css standard and that coding for specifically for IE means that they are setting themselves up for more re-work in the long run.

Currently IE does not support all of css standards, but other browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari support it. As one becomes more familiar with css, you will notice that certain css attributes IE will not like but Firefox will like, or Firefox wont like and IE will. Lots of dependencies and quirky behavior, which i believe makes css a language with high learning curve to make a site look accurate.

My advice is to code for a standard css browser and then use workarounds to make it look great on IE because what will happen is when MS comes out with IE 7.0+ they might become css compliant and suddenly your layout that works in 6 will no longer work in newer versions. which means that from the ground-up you will have to go through the code and figure out which attributes and properties have changed and no longer work. If you take the approach prescribed and code with css standard browsers as the baseline, when IE changes, you will only have to change the IE workaround file or simply get rid of it.

ive included a possible solution to mitigate this problem:

CODE

<!-- begin code provided by createblog.com -->

<style type="text/css" title="currentStyle">
 @import "css/link.css";
</style>

<!--[if IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/link_ie.css" />
<![endif]-->

<!-- end code provided by createblog.com -->

what this code does is your setting a default css style - "link.css" which is located in the folder css. and if the browser is IE 6 then also add the stylesheet- "link_ie.css"

what i propose is to put the baseline code in link.css and any workarounds be put in link_ie.css

hopefully that helps someone.