I’ve had it with IE - time to “Browse Happy”
I know IE7 is a lot better than its predecessors but there still seems to be the need for little hacks or workarounds to get IE to play nice! So if you are getting tired of IE’s little quirks then join the bigredradish and Browse Happy!
So what was the straw that broke the camel’s back? The humble q tag! I like to keep my code as semantic as it can possibly be - but it would seem that IE doesn’t want me to do that! I know it’s just one little letter ‘q’ , but it allows me to semantically add a short inline quote and provide meaningful additional information via the cite and lang attributes.
Most modern visual browsers (except IE!) will add the quotation marks automatically when q tags are used and these can be made language specific with the lang attribute. But that’s not very standards compliant I hear you cry. True, it does give this little HTML tag a degree of presentational skill, but personally I think this is far outweighed by the semantic value.
So what am I to do? I know you can use JavaScript to fix quotes in internet explorer. CSS wise, the :before and :after pseudo-elements would do the trick nicely, but are not supported by IE (see what I mean about frustrating)! In an A List Apart article entitled Long Live the Q Tag the author suggests adding the quotation marks outside of the q tag for the benefit of IE and then using the :before and :after pseudo-elements to take them away again in compliant browsers.
I know that using the JavaScript method combined with a conditional comment so that only IE 7 and below run the script is probably the best option, but JavaScript always seems a bit too much like pixie magic to me (probably because I don’t understand it). At least I know what is going on with the CSS method, although it is a bit of a backwards way of getting round the problem!
Perhaps I’ll just forget about IE, keep using the q tag as it is and wait for the quote element in XHTML2. What will I do in the meantime - Browse Happy!
