Conditional CSS and XHTML

“In an ideal world we’d write our (X)HTML and CSS once and it would work perfectly for all browsers. In the real world different browsers and platforms render our creations slightly or drastically different, depending on how adventurous we get with our (X)HTML and CSS. To combat these browser peculiarities developers have adopted a number of coping strategies, including:

• @import to hide more advanced styles from older browsers (Netscape 4.x etc.)
• CSS hacks (voice-family, escapes, “Tantek hacks,” and other techniques)
• Conditional CSS

While the @import method works fine, it introduces another HTTP request for modern browsers in the performance-sensitive head section. CSS hacks are useful when applying small snippets of styles to different browsers. But for the most flexibility and speed, conditional CSS rules. Conditional CSS uses the if-else branching logic built into XSSI to deliver different CSS based on browser environment strings.”

Read the full article from WebSite Optimization. This is a good one for anyone who needs to make a web page compatible with a wide range of browser types. Additional references are provided for those who need to know more than what the author had included.