You know the story.  CSS differences between IE and Firefox / Opera / Safari / Chrome / Everyone Else have always been a pain.

Well, as it turns out, most browsers use C-Style comments in their CSS.  C has two style of comments:  /* Like this */ which comments out a block, and // Like This

The above comments everything after the // on the line.

I haven’t found // in the CSS standard, and … IE just ignores these characters.  It proccesses anything after the // as if the // wasn’t there at all.  Other browsers seem to think it’s a comment, and ignore the // and everything after.

In other words if you have this tag:

#myblock {
margin: 0px;
// margin: 10px;
}

IE will use a margin of 10px, and all the other browsers: 0px.

I haven’t tested it out with IE8 yet.  But works in IE6 and 7 which are the biggest pains anyway.

I’ll come up with a better example later but this is HUGE!  Now we can put IE-specific CSS in our CSS files, to make IE do things that the other browsers will just ignore!

Of course, anyone that’s reading this that’s using IE6 or IE7 – UPGRADE.  You are exposing yourself to serious security problems.  Latest news is that these old browsers are susceptible to virus attacks that can take over your machine.  I’ve a mind to make my websites display “Upgrade your browser – You’re in DANGER!” if they are using an old version of IE.

Now, I could do that conditional stuff with just CSS!