No more hacking IE?

For the webdesigners out there that read this blog, there are a few important things to know about IE 7 and it's treatment of CSS

• 1) the Holly hack won't work properly anymore...
• 2) ...the Star-HTML hack is gone.

quoted from this article on the MSDN blog

In IE7, we will fix as many of the worst bugs that web developers hit as we can, and we will add the critical most-requested features from the standards as well. Though you won't see (most of) these until Beta 2, we have already fixed the following bugs from PositionIsEverything and Quirksmode:

• Peekaboo bug
• Guillotine bug
• Duplicate Character bug
• Border Chaos
• No Scroll bug
• 3 Pixel Text Jog
• Magic Creeping Text bug
• Bottom Margin bug on Hover
• Losing the ability to highlight text under the top border
• IE/Win Line-height bug
• Double Float Margin Bug
• Quirky Percentages in IE
• Duplicate indent
• Moving viewport scrollbar outside HTML borders
• 1 px border style
• Disappearing List-background
• Fix width:auto

In addition we've added support for the following

• HTML 4.01 ABBR tag
• Improved (though not yet perfect) fallback
• CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)
• CSS 2.1 Fixed positioning
• Alpha channel in PNG images
• Fix :hover on all elements
• Background-attachment: fixed on all elements not just body

I want to be clear that our intent is to build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate web standards, in particular CSS 2 ( 2.1, once it's been Recommended). I think we will make a lot of progress against that in IE7 through our goal of removing the worst painful bugs that make our platform difficult to use for web developers.

quoted from this article by Chris Wilson on the MSDN blog

Chris has also listed some of the common hacks that should no longer be required or indeed function as they were intended to

Here is a list of common CSS hacks to look out for (please also consider their variations):

• html > body
• * html
• head:first-child + body
• head + body
• body > element

If you want to target IE or bypass IE, you can use conditional comments .

Visit Call to action for the full story and some examples