IE7, The Script

I was having dinner with friends last week, and one of them, another HTML monkey, told me about a fantastic JavaScript you could conditionally attach to IE6 to make it behave like IE7 (and well, now IE8). After the previous week’s headaches with the absolutely positioned elements next to floating ones, I said if this script works as advertised, why the hell hasn’t anyone told me about it before now?

So I’ve been giving it a shot with my new BlueTrip framework installed, and, well, it’s not manna from heaven. In fact, all the main problems I have with IE6 aren’t fixed with the IE8.js or IE7.js. One of the subsidiary scripts (to recalculate the box model) made IE6 and IE7 crash. On top of not fixing the major problems in IE6, it also breaks what I’ve already fixed, and I don’t want to hack fix a hacked fix.

In all, I put the conditional for IE7 to use the IE8.js script — even though the effect is fairly minor and causes a redraw burp — but I left IE6 the way it is. Honestly, at this point, knowing the hacks already, and having to use a conditional stylesheet anyway (for Peekaboo bug, 3-pixel job, etc. that don’t get handled by the script), it’s just easier to do it manually. Makes sense now why I’ve never heard anyone else hawk this “solution.”

On second thought, considering the redraw burp, I may as well take it off for IE7, too.

I knew it sounded too good to be true.

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What the script does fix:

• Fixed positioning
• Maximum and minimum width and height
• Many selectors previously unsupported are now supported 
• IE6 will support alpha transparency for png images both as background and foreground images – but see next

And my brief testing concluded that the max-/min-height support didn’t really work either. I’m not sure about the rest since I try not to use those.