IE8 on the way!

[David]

This article (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/01/internet_explorer_standards/) gives an indication of what we can expect but it sound like Microsoft are serious about web standards and (in theory) sites that work in FF should also work in IE8.

I recently discovered that working with IE7 is better than IE6 but not much. I ended up coding for FF and then adding one set of hacks for IE6 and another set for IE7.

[James]

In the sites I've recently built, IE7 and FF have rendered the same. IE6 on the other hand is a pain. The conditional commenting that IE recognises is very handy though: I put all IE6 hacks in a separate stylesheet. No problems with IE7 as yet.

<!--[if IE 6]>
<link href="ie6.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<![endif]-->

[David]

I agree, in MOST cases, IE7 renders the same as FF but for certain layouts, it is different. I'm currently working on a site for a design practice that relies on padding and margin for the layout and has floating divs over a background image. In order to get it pixel perfect in all target browsers, I had to hack for both IE6 and IE7.

The conditional is very useful and I may tidy up my CSS using that method.

Take a sneak peek at work in progress here (http://www.fabrikuk.com/new/template.html) and here (http://www.fabrikuk.com/new/template2.html).