Sunday, October 2, 2011

Microsoft drops the Conditional Comments in IE10

Microsoft added many features to ‘Internet Explorer’ over years. The team intends to remove several of the less-successful legacy features in IE10. The conditional comments used in IE6,7,8 and 9 are now going to disappear in IE10.Ensuring you website or application works in all browsers is tough. It’s made particularly difficult when you have to support older editions of Internet Explorer. It’s unreasonable to expect a 10 year old browser to render the same as Firefox 5 or Chrome 12.
During the development of IE6 :
  1. The bugs are well-documented and its possible to overcome the majority of issues
  2. Microsoft provide ‘Conditional Comments’ so that developers can add custom CSS and script fixes which target a specific version of IE.

What are Conditional Comments actually???
Examine the source of almost any HTML5 page and you will find this code in the head:
<!--[if lt IE 9]>

<script src="http://html5.shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js">

</script>

<![endif]-->
It loads a shim in IE8 and below which allows the developer to style new HTML5 elements . It’s not required in IE9 and other browsers with native HTML5 support — they ignore the script.
Conditional Comments are incredibly useful but, they are rarely necessary. Moreover, They are little like browser sniffing.
What is the need to remove Conditional Comments???
IE8 is normally well-behaved. The requirement is of only the HTML5 shim . With a few CSS3 exceptions, IE9 renders as well as any other browser. Hopefully, IE10 will catch-up — or even can overtake — Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari.
Conditional Comments are not required. There’s no need for “[if IE 10]“ because pages will be displayed (mostly) the same in all modern browsers. Moreover, Conditional Comments will not disappear from IE6, 7, 8 and 9. However, its removal will horrify some developers because the use of conditional comments had made work somewhat easy for them. Now let’s wait for the next IE10 without Conditional Comments.

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