IE 8 is Coming. Is Your CSS Ready?

If you created sites with poor CSS usage (read: hacks, excessive use of in-line styles and single catch-all stylesheets) prepare to find your pages broken in IE 8. It is old news now, but if you aren't already aware IE 8 will for the most part be standards compliant. If you made hacks specifically for IE in the past, or targeted all version of IE with a single stylesheet, you will probably have severely broken pages.

You can turn on "quirks" mode when your page is displayed in IE 8, but wouldn't you just rather do it the right way?

As an object lesson, do a view source on this page. You will see the following CSS files referenced:

In my experience using if statements that target IE 6 and IE 7 is the easiest way to address IE issues - which incidentally is how I developed TechUrbia. As it turns out it also seems to be the best way to ensure that your pages appear correctly in IE 8. If I had targeted all version of IE with my specific styles for noncompliance the IE 8 in its default setting would display many layout erros.

My advice for future proofing your display code, would be to always adhere to standards compliance guidelines, even if the market leading browser doesn't. It may take extra effort up front, but this method keeps you from having to do major rework in the long term. And who likes putting in overtime on old sites?