CSS Browser Detection - The complete guide

Different browsers, different CSS interpretations! There will be a time when you'll need to hide some CSS rules from a particular browser, or even all the CSS file! In this articles I'll try to compile all possible types of Browser detection technics and provide examples. So let's start with the easier one! Browser detection for Netscape Netscape 4 is probably the dumbest browser when it comes to CSS support, extremely limited and many times erroneous! As the browser's market share of Netscape is below 0.5% it became natural to hide the CSS file from it! The method used for this is the import directive that will make the browser to display a version of the site completely without CSS. Here's the directive you have to call: (style type="text/css")@import url(wise-designscom.css);(/style) Browser Detection for IE Mac computers This browser "died" when Microsoft announced there would be no more updated versions of it. Now this browser fell in desuse and there are a wide range of CSS technics that IE/Mac doesn't interpret well! Therefore many webmasters started to code their CSS sites so that they would work correctly on this browsers. Contrary to Netscape users, these weren't neglected. The hide technic: /* Hide from IE-Mac */ #header {padding-bottom:3em} #footer {padding-top:1.5em} /* End hide */ IE/Mac won't see these commands but will display the content even without those rules! Now... if you have a specific area of your site that isn't vital to your visitors you can just hide it completely from this browser without having the trouble to even try and make it look better within the possible! Here's how: #noiemac {display: none} /* Hide from IE-Mac */ #noiemac {display: block} /* End hide */ The first rule hides it all from IE/Mac (e.g
content to hide here!
) The second CSS ruledisplays the section cause Ie/Mac can't see it! Browser Detection for Internet Explorer For this one we'll have to use the "child selector". This rule consists of two elements, the parent and his child! Let it be html>body, body being the child of html the parent! As IE don't understand it, it will come a time when this knowledge will come to be handy! The typical example of the header margin: #header {margin-bottom:4em} html>body #header {margin-bottom:1em} IE will use the 1st rule cause it's blind to the 2nd and all other browsers will use the 2nd one! Browser Detection for Internet Explorer 5 At first this one was strange to me! How the hell we have to set different rules for different VERSIONS of the same browser? Well, the truth is that IE5 doesn't get right the box model! When we specify the width of an element in CSS, that doesn't include the values of padding and borders. IE5 include these values in the width, which leads to widths become smaller in it! Let's see the following example: #header {padding: 2em; border: 1em; width: 12em} For all browsers this width would be 12em! For IEe the width would be 6em!! God! How is that possible? Simple: 12em (Width) - 4 (padding left + padding right) - 2 (border left + border right)! Is there any solution for this problem? Sure! A clever guy, named Tantek