Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Internet Explorer 5.x on Macintosh

At the time, Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh (IE 5.x/Mac) was tops for CSS-based design. IE 5/Mac’s rendering code, dubbed The Tasman layout engine (which Tantek Çelik led the development of), was the first to offer complete support for CSS Level 1, HTML 4.01, PNG 1.0, as well as child and adjacent sibling selectors—pretty advanced stuff for 2000. That said, IE 5.x/Mac has its share of problems, too.

Many of IE 5.x/Mac’s issues revolve around positioned elements and floats, resulting in unnecessary scrollbars, elements that are too wide, incorrect wrapping, and phantom margins. Though there are fairly straightforward workarounds for these bugs, some CSS designers have started to degrade their designs for IE 5.x/Mac as well. That said, there are many who continue to support IE 5.x/Mac to serve the numerous folks (often in public schools) using Macs that can only run Mac OS 9.x, where IE 5.1/Mac is the best browser they can use. Again, consulting your server logs is a good idea before dropping complete support for any browser.

Tip

You can find a compendium of many IE 5.x/Mac bugs (as well as fixes for them) at http://www.macedition.com/cb/ie5macbugs/index.html.

There are a few different ways to hide CSS rules from IE 5.x/Mac. The first is known as the Commented Backslash Hack (http://www.sam-i-am.com/work/sandbox/css/mac_ie5_hack.html):

 div { color: red; /* <-- shown to IE5.x/Mac backslash --> \*/ color: green; /* <-- hidden from IE5.x/Mac reset --> ...