Hacker News Reader

Another interesting one I've stumbled on is the underscore hack. This is a way to apply CSS only to IE 6: http://designpepper.com/2008/01/09/defeating-ie6-with-emphas...

#page { background-color: white; _background-color: black; }

This applies background-color black to IE 6 only, and white to everything else.

View on HN

You shouldn't really be including hacks straight into your main css. The main reason being that you have no idea how future browsers will handle the hack because is basically undocumented, and this might cause you - or your client - grief in the future.

Include a new stylesheet via conditional comments and you can isolate any IE browser while not needing any hacks. (i.e., you can just declare the background color directly)

Yes you are correct that this should hardly ever be done, and instead be handled the way you specified.

I do still think its interesting and may be useful in cases where you might have access to only CSS and not templates.

Most clients don't want to pay you to create an IE only CSS file, takes minutes I agree but if they won't pay a few quid extra then why should I do it.

TBH I usually do this sort of thing (add an ie6.css file instead of a hack) as I tend to over-engineer rather than keeping to the agreed spec and work schedule.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com