with the arrival of IE7 – we are again faced with different problems for our CSS implementation…
In this transitional period with a number of people ready to upgrade (encouraged by the automated prompt) – there will also be a number of people out there who will not agree so quickly and will stick with IE6 a while longer. To fix the display errors both versions of IE will inevitably show – we will need to use hacks for both versions.

There are some excellent resources online about hacks, how they work, why you should or shouldn’t use specific hacks … and so much more … It will be important to keep up to date with the latest developments and implement the appropriate changes to your site setups – please reference links provided here.

Just to mention one – commonly used and very reliable – the BOX MODEL HACK by TANTEK:

see original page for more info: tantek.com

It relies on a parsing bug and gives a specific width – only to override it, please read Tantek’s page for the full explanation.

There are other hacks which are equally effective, such as the Holly Hack, and which can be used for the different display bugs IE can throw at us webdesigners, please read this page on positioniseverything.net for details: → CSS hacks and IE7

With the new version 7 of IE now out and available – it seems that conditional comments might be the best way forward. Instead of setting up the hacks where necessary to fix display errors in an extra style sheet which needs to be fully loaded regardless of which browser is accessing the page – using a conditional comment will load a different style sheet if a specific version of IE is detected. This setup allows for tageting of the different versions of browsers and will enable us to set up different style sheets, customised to fix display bugs specific to the IE version found.

The conditional comments use the HTML structure and can therefore only be used on the HTML page itself.
Please refer the original page on quirksmode.org:
→ conditional comments

As the code is uses the comment syntax – all modern browsers will ignore the conditional comment whereas IE is programmed to read and implement it. You can therefore use it to attach specific style sheets to a page only when a relevant version of IE is detected.