Like every web developer, I usually curse the creators of IE6 with foul and untimely deaths at least once a week. Yet my company requires me to keep supporting that most-hated of browsers.
My problem today has been wanting to first use a wildcard in my CSS and then trying to use the "inherit" property instead. Neither of which are supported by IE7-.
I really, REALLY want to have good, well-structured, properly-inheriting CSS (object-oriented CSS, if you like that buzzword) but I have that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that sooner or later, it's going to have to be custom-purpose and location-based classes.
This poses the question: given how utterly awful IE is at handling many CSS concepts, is it impossible to adequately support this browser at the same time as having a well-structured CSS document?
Just to clarify: I'm aware that there are plenty of ways (some legitimate, some less so) to get around the bugs and shortcomings found in IE6 and 7. What I'm really asking is "if you want to have a single, well-written stylesheet that inherits correctly, must you choose between that and having a consistent look across all browsers?". Hope that makes sense.
In other words, should I stick to my principles and code a good style sheet or should I accept that IE6 still enjoys a horribly high (20% on last count) market share and bring myself to support it? Or is there some happy medium that allows me to minimise the frankenstein surgery on my HTML and CSS while still achieving some respectable results in IE?
To be fair, you can't blame it all on IE (though Microsoft certainly is by far the worst transgressor). Part of the problem with such large & rapidly-evolving standards is that it's too much of a moving target to be perfectly implemented in a timely fashion. Unfortunately, the release cycles of web browsers do not coincide with the release of new web specifications. So all browser developers can do is try to implement as many features as they can from the latest W3C recommendations, selecting what they think will be the most commonly used features to implement first.
However, things are clearly improving, and it is possible to support IE6/7 and still use proper CSS design. It's just... difficult. Take a look at this comparison of layout engines & CSS support. If you look at the overall trend, you'll see that most browsers (even IE) do tend to comply with established standards in the long-run, it just takes some browsers longer than others to implement a standard after its introduction.
And sometimes it's not that one browser is "less" standards-compliant than another. With new standards the problem is often that different development teams chose to adopt different parts of the new specification. So even though CSS3 is already beginning to be implemented by most browsers, we'll probably have to wait until CSS4 is published before seeing consistent support across all major rendering engines. And if you try to use the latest CSS3 features right now, you'll have a hard time establishing compatibility across all major browsers. But if you're using features introduced in CSS1, it's no problem at all.
Therefore, the only option--aside from using ugly CSS hacks--is to stick with well-established older specifications. Then the problem is no longer trying to conform to web standards while supporting a particular browser. Instead the problem simply becomes trying to resist the urge to use the latest & greatest CSS features.
Aside from that, the only permanent solution I see to this recurring situation is for the W3C to prioritize different parts of newly introduced specifications so that the new features can be implemented in discrete phases synchronized across all the major browsers. So, for instance, grammar rules might be given the highest priority along with a set deadline for its implementation. After that would come the second phase, which could be element & attribute selectors, and so on and so forth.
This would require a tremendous level of cooperation between the W3C and development teams, but it would be worth it. After all, it does users and web developers no good for IE to implement one subset of features from CSS3 while Firefox implements a different subset and the Webkit browsers yet another subset. A "standard" is no good until it's actually standardized across all the major rendering platforms. It's better for each browser to support fewer new features but have them all be the same features, than for them to separately introduce a ton of their own features that aren't universally supported.