Preventing IE6 from loading stylesheet

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Mark Shroyer - 24 Apr 2008 20:44 GMT

I just completed a new design for a personal web site. After finishing
the basic CSS stuff and double-checking it in Safari, FF, Opera, et al.,
I put on my war paint and fired up IE7 to figure out what kind of hacks
I'd have to apply. Delightfully, IE7 only needed four or five tweaks
this time around...

But next I opened the test page in my IE6 VM, and it took me a few
seconds to even realize what the heck I was looking at. I could
possibly make it render halfway decently with several hours' work, but
why bother? It's just a crummy personal web page. What I'd like to do
instead is to somehow trick IE6 into not loading any styles whatsoever,
so that the page renders like it would in, e.g., lynx; I have the luxury
of not jumping through hoops for IE6 users here, but I don't feel like
leaving the site non-navigable to them, either.

I know about the  thing, but what I
want is basically the logical inverse of that, so that I can prevent IE6
from loading any of my CSS to begin with: some relatively stable way of
making an @import directive or an HTML <link rel="stylesheet"... />
visible to everything *but* IE6.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance...

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Bjoern Hoehrmann - 24 Apr 2008 20:55 GMT

* Mark Shroyer wrote in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets:

>I know about the  thing, but what I
>want is basically the logical inverse of that, so that I can prevent IE6
>from loading any of my CSS to begin with: some relatively stable way of
>making an @import directive or an HTML <link rel="stylesheet"... />
>visible to everything *but* IE6.

If conditional comments would work for you, I suggest you have a look at
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537512.aspx which should have
the right expression for you.

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Mark Shroyer - 24 Apr 2008 21:56 GMT

In article
<bbp114domkk1j2ch1ipqk4kd8ltslhvv68@hive.bjoern.hoehrmann.de>,

> * Mark Shroyer wrote in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets:
> >I know about the  thing, but what I
[quoted text clipped - 6 lines]
> http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537512.aspx which should have
> the right expression for you.

Thanks for the hint, but that doesn't quite work*... but I probably
should have been more specific with regard to my 'requirements'. While
something like

<![if !(IE 6)]>
<link rel="stylesheet" ... />
<![endif]>

works most places, it is not valid XHTML so I'd like to avoid it. On
the other hand, I don't mind using the other form of conditional
comments (which I mentioned above) because it is valid HTML.

[* Unless there's something else I'm failing to understand...]

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Bjoern Hoehrmann - 24 Apr 2008 22:11 GMT

* Mark Shroyer wrote in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets:

>Thanks for the hint, but that doesn't quite work*... but I probably
>should have been more specific with regard to my 'requirements'. While
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
>the other hand, I don't mind using the other form of conditional
>comments (which I mentioned above) because it is valid HTML.

You can use the form you are comfortable with, e.g.



would be valid and hidden from Internet Explorer 6.0; using



would exclude Internet Explorer 6 aswell, but include its predecessors.

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Mark Shroyer - 24 Apr 2008 23:14 GMT

In article
<fmt114hr3echpe8jo8ukme7m2bdhh6td03@hive.bjoern.hoehrmann.de>,

> * Mark Shroyer wrote in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets:
> >Thanks for the hint, but that doesn't quite work*... but I probably
[quoted text clipped - 14 lines]
> ...
> <![endif]-->

Sure it would be hidden from IE 6, but it would be hidden from every
other browser as well.

Thanks for the suggestion, but because conditional comments are a
Microsoft-only extension, this does not resolve the original problem;
this example would only work if the only browsers that one is concerned
about are the different versions of IE.

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Bjoern Hoehrmann - 24 Apr 2008 23:40 GMT

* Mark Shroyer wrote in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets:

>Sure it would be hidden from IE 6, but it would be hidden from every
>other browser as well.

I see, then you can use the method proposed in the comments there,


...


Here Validators and other browsers will treat this as two comments
with "..." between them, while Internet Explorer 6 and predecessors
with support for conditional comments will treat it differently.
What they see is probably not "valid HTML" but this is as close as
you will get as far as ease of use is concerned.

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Mark Shroyer - 24 Apr 2008 21:46 GMT

> I know about the  thing, but what I
> want is basically the logical inverse of that, so that I can prevent IE6
> from loading any of my CSS to begin with: some relatively stable way of
> making an @import directive or an HTML <link rel="stylesheet"... />
> visible to everything *but* IE6.

I managed to come up with something that works after a little more
fooling around:

<style type="text/css">
@import url('screen.css') screen;
@import url('print.css') print;
</style>


It turns out that IE 6 can't understand media specifiers in the context
of an @import directive, so it just ignores the entire directive.
Unfortunately, IE 7 does not understand this either, so it is necessary
to load the screen stylesheet with <link> inside an IE 7 conditional
comment.

I'd still be interested to hear other suggestions, though... or any
takes on whether this is a wise thing to do. (Is there anything else
out there other than pre-7 versions of IE that's likely to choke on
this?)

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BootNic - 25 Apr 2008 16:50 GMT

[snip]

> I'd still be interested to hear other suggestions,

[snip]

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BootNic Friday April 25, 2008 11:50 AM
Behind every successful woman...is a substantial amount of coffee.
*Stephanie Piro*

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dorayme - 25 Apr 2008 00:30 GMT

> I just completed a new design for a personal web site. After finishing
> the basic CSS stuff and double-checking it in Safari, FF, Opera, et al.,
[quoted text clipped - 18 lines]
>
> Any suggestions? Thanks in advance...

Why don't you put the war paint back on and take a good look at your
html and css and see what IE6 is having *so* much trouble with. It might
well be that in doing so, you will unearth issues where you should be
simplifying in the first place. There may be an issue we can help you
with and once identified it could be fixed by an over-riding conditional.

This is what I do sometimes: duplicate the main stylesheet and call it
ie#.css or whatever. Get it operating by the usual conditional method
(in the head to link to it, underneath the one for all the other
browsers).

I then fire up IE and start removing huge chunks of the ie#.css to see
if anything horrible happens. You might be surprised how quickly you
will identify the area of concern.

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dorayme

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Webmaster Forum / HTML, CSS, Scripts / CSS / April 2008

Preventing IE6 from loading stylesheet