Double Vision – Give the Browsers CSS They Can Digest - The way of confusion – browser hacks
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A lot of developers have spent a lot of time to find out about the differences and fallacies of the different browser engines, and come up with a lot of hacks for how to send a special style to this or that browser (http://centricle.com/ref/css/filters/) or how to hide some rules from that or the other.
Amazing as this feat might be – and on certain occasions it is a life saver – it still binds us to the browser, rather than concentrating on following standards and making sure our code will work in the future, too.
The topic of browser hacks is very vast indeed (http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=CssHack), and there are some good articles published about it, along with some very good resources. Still, browser hacks should be used as a last resort. If some browser rigorously claims to be able to show a certain style, but fails terribly to comply, it is time to apply a browser hack to teach it some manners.
What most browser hacks do, though, is make our CSS invalid and hard to maintain. If we work in a distributed developer environment, browser hacks should be properly commented to avoid confusion further down the line.
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