CSS comment hacks (was: small errors in the CSS2.1 grammar)

On 1/15/03 10:08 AM, "Lars Knoll" <lars@trolltech.com> wrote:
> 
> My version of flex doesn't seem to handle the comment specification correctly
> (the end of comments as eg "/***/" are not recognised for some reason),
> although the expression looks correct to me:
> 

I may be blaspheming this list, but I'd request that you document it and
leave it that way. Browser-specific CSS comment hacks have become essential
in correct cross-browser display of CSS-P while still retaining standards
compliance.

In practice, you could comment specific rules and then override them with
CSS2 selectors like html>body of [attribute="value"] so that, theoretically,
all future releases of browsers would recognize the CSS2 selectors and have
a correct style sheet.

Unfortunately, Safari has thrown a new wrench in the mix because it doesn't
recognize the CSS2 selectors that were supposed to "work for any future
release of any compliant browser". I've been looking for a new CSS comment
hack that will work on it. Anybody know of one?

Sure, I would love to write no exception code in any of my documents, but
I'm a web developer in the real world and have to make certain sacrifices.
The fact of the matter is that even if all browsers recognize every rule and
display it correctly, things are still going to differ from agent to agent.
Look at the differences in the current implementations of border-style; they
are are correct, but they are all different because of lack of detail in the
specification... Every agent will have 'some' differences, and I see CSS
comment hacks as a standards compliant way to work around this. I'd much
rather throw in a few extra CSS rules (with comments) than write a bunch of
non-standard, non-semantic, unmanageable markup.

Any thoughts? Come shoot me down. I'm ready. ;)

James

Received on Wednesday, 15 January 2003 13:03:00 UTC