[Irl-dean] CSS, Conditional Comments and Using Multiple IE

[Joshue O Connor]

Hi all,

I have already asked Gez and Maura about this but I wonder if anyone 
else has come across this problem.

Part 1: I am building a website and I wish to use conditional comments 
to serve different CSS files/rule to each browser as needed. I have my 
CSS for "good browsers" and then I usually write more as needed with 
fixes/variations for IE.

However, with the following code I found problems with getting the < IE 
6 rules to display at all.
< IE 6 were instead loading the style sheet 'good_browser.css' (which is 
for Mozilla etc and IE 8 where it works happily).

Here is the code, any pointers appreciated but it is pretty OK.

  <!--[if lte IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../test/css/ie.css" />
<![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 7]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../test/css/ie7.css" />
<![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 8]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" 
href="../test/css/good_browser.css" />
<![endif]-->
<!--[if !IE]> <-->
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" 
href="../test/css/good_browser.css"  />
<!--> <![endif]-->

But no matter what I did, it would not work and the good_browser.css 
file seemed to consistently be the default for IE 6 and earlier. Then I 
came to the following conclusion.

Part 2: I am using Multiple IE and I think I *may* have gotten to the 
bottom of the problem. After much digging, there seems to be a problem 
correctly using Multiple versions of IE on the same local machine, and 
conditional comments. Basically when using conditional comments to serve 
different style sheets/rules etc, each browser will actually behave, or 
identify itself as the highest numbered version of IE that you have 
installed on your local machine.

For example, if you have IE 8 installed on your local machine, (as I 
have) even if you open up say IE 6 or IE 5.5 to test how some style 
looks etc, they will *still* be served the CSS/rules etc for IE 8 as the 
older browser seems to identify itself as the highest numbered version.

Any ideas, solutions appreciated as Multiple IE is great - but it does 
need to work *properly* to be of any use for development. [1]

Also if anyone has come across this and there is a patch or similar (or 
another way of really running different versions of IE on a local 
machine please let me know).

Cheers

Josh

[1] http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE





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