The Wild Hacks That Made Old Internet Explorer Bend to CSS
CSS Curiosities of the Past
Before modern standards, CSS was twisted into browser-specific hacks to tame Internet Explorer. This tour revisits the star and underscore property tricks, !important quirks, the clearfix zoom, cursor: hand, CSS expressions that ran JavaScript, DirectX filters, scrollbar styling, HTML Components, and the box model and Holly hacks. These relics reveal how messy parsing and corporate divergence shaped the early web.
The problem with expressions is that they are evaluated more frequently than most people expect. Not only are they evaluated when the page is rendered and resized, but also when the page is scrolled and even when the user moves the mouse over the page.
- tiborsaas
Remember rounded corners? It was a real pain, there were so many hacks to achieve something simple as
border-radius: 16px;
My other favorite was sIFR font loading :) Because font support was... patchy, a technique was invented to replace headers with Flash embeds which rendered the desired font:
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/sifr-2004
- zetanor
Besides vendor tricks, I'd like to see a showcase or article about the evolution of page layout patterns over time. That is, the underlying techniques, not the aesthetics; tables, fixed image sizes, float/clear, flex, etc. I'm finding https://code-literacy.medium.com/css-layout-evolution-detail... but it's quite skeletal and incomplete. Has anyone here come across a more complete write-up?
- VCFundedGenYer
I last heavily worked with CSS in 2010/2011. These still don't feel old to me.
There came a point where if you wrote good HTML/CSS that passed the W3C validator, you were golden on pretty much any device. This still rings true today.
- QuadrupleA
IE was such a scourge, a drain on humanity (at least the slice of humanity that made websites). One of Microsoft's great evils - they let the product stagnate for years once they had the market cornered.
Windows has kinda become that now, a low quality user-hostile product forced on people through inertia and monopoly tactics.
- meerita
I was having a peaceful day until these CSS curiosities brought back memories of my painful days. It's really good that we don't need to deal with such hacks and vendor-specific things anymore. The last time I participated in a project that targeted an old browser was in 2018!