Documenting the Hacks: CSS Browser Targeting
I think I’m somewhat of a rarity in the world of web developers – I actively use and certainly approve of CSS hacks to target and fix certain browsers. Of course, I don’t condone their use unless it is absolutely necessary, and in most cases good, standards compliant CSS should alleviate most issues before they occur, but when there is a need I think these hacks can be a great way to fix issues while still keeping your CSS logical and concise. The caveat to this is that all hacks need good comments to describe what is going on for future reference, whether that be your own or that of another developer. Also, always keep in mind that hacks can break when new browser versions are released, so always keep an eye out and use them sparingly.
I’ve always found it hard to find a good reference for these hacks. There are many sites that talk about an individual hack, but finding a single place that goes through targeting all the different browsers has been hard. This post hopes to solve that – more for my own use, but hopefully other developers can find it useful as well. What follows are the hacks that I use, which I believe to be the most logical and simple ones out there. In every case, #selector represents the element you want to apply a rule to (this can be either an ID or a class), and property and value represent any normal CSS property.
