the ryan king

I’ve been meaning to comment on Tantek’s awesome Pandora’s Box (Model) of CSS Hacks And Other Good Intentions and I’ve got tons of schoolwork to do, so now seems as good a time as any.

I’m probably indirectly responsible for his post being written. You see, awhile back, the CSS Working Group was all in town for one of their periodic F2F meetings. The night before their meetings, I and another local out to dinner with the WG.

I ended up sitting between Tantek and Marcus, of Microsoft, who wrote a somewhat controversial article, Call to action: The demise of CSS hacks and broken pages, in which he proposes that web developers use conditional compilation, rather than CSS hacks (which are disappearing in IE 7).

I made the mistake of agreeing with Marcus on this issue. :D

Tantek has some very good points and obviously, as always, but a great deal of though into the design of the first CSS hacks. Until that night at dinner, I never quite realized all the design decisions he had made. Once he got done, I said “have you blogged this?” and he said “no.” The rest, as they say, is history.