Getting Ready for IE7

With the release of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 on the immediate horizon, folks like me who build websites for a living have some work to do. In a nutshell, IE7 fixes lots of bugs in IE6 and earlier, and ironically, the tricks we used to keep these earlier versions looking good have the potential to make the newer, better browser look bad.

So what to do? First, don't panic. Second, read Tantek's take on hacks. It was written last year, but it's still dead-on. Third, conditional comments are your friend.

So for now, I'm keeping my much-used box model hack, and making a surprisingly small number of modifications, mostly involving moving a few rules into conditional comments. Of course, all this effort is for client work — no time to worry about this old site for now.

Update: If you are using conditional comments, but also have multiple standalone versions of IE on a single machine, you need to read this how-to guide to get conditional comments working right in the older versions.

Update 10/19/2006: After installing IE7, conditional comments in older browsers will be broken. You will need to redo the procedure in the update above to enable them again.