[thelist] Conditional Statements -- any downside?

Shawn K. Quinn skquinn at speakeasy.net
Sun Oct 21 15:50:08 CDT 2007


On Sun, 2007-10-21 at 09:37 -0700, Jon Hughes wrote:
> Does anyone have anything against conditional comments?

1) They are an IE feature, not a standard Web browser feature. Firefox,
Opera, Safari, Konqueror, Lynx, w3m, Dillo, Epiphany, and dozens of
other browsers may wind up choking on them or at least not giving the
expected results.

2) If carelessly written, you will have invalid HTML. Even if written
"correctly" you may fool the validator into rejecting a document that
would otherwise be valid.

3) By the design and function of a conditional comment, the validator
will see a different document from whatever version(s) of IE you target.
This can be bad, because IE is flaky enough when given valid HTML and
CSS, let alone something that deviates from the standards.

-- 
Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at speakeasy.net>




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