Conditional Statements

I designed my first site using 100% CSS recently and I have to say I was not very impressed with the lack of browser support from Internet Explorer. In testing, the latest versions of Netscape, Firefox, Safari and Opera all produced the results I was looking for but Explorer wasn’t very cooperative. I admit that IE7 wasn’t that bad, but why couldn’t they just get it right this time around like the other browsers? Lucky for me, conditional statements came in handy.

Conditional statements are something developed by Microsoft that allow Explorer to peak inside an additional CSS for alternate styles. For instance, if IE6 is rendering an element slightly differently than Firefox, a custom style sheet made specifically for IE6 will allow you to create an identical look in both browsers. There’s also an SEO advantage to using conditional statements. Previously, building different pages for different browsers was quite common. The method caused two problems with SEO though:

1) Duplicate pages means duplicate content
2) Using this method leaves the index page free of content, as it acts as a doorway page to the browser specific page.

Conditional statements eliminate the use of doorway pages and browser specific pages which is a great thing for SEO. But as far as designing is concerned, it would be great if Microsoft gets it right next time around.