ie6 css fixer v0.7
Less than a month ago we released version 0.6 of the IE6 CSS Fixer, now it's time to expand our little tool yet again. There's only one major addition this time, but from where we stand it's a pretty interesting one, definitely justifying a number upgrade. Enter version 0.7.
new and improved
As promised in our previous article we looked into incorporating a fix for transparent background pngs. This quest led us to a pretty interesting method conceived by the good people behind TJK Design. This fix is not exactly perfect, but it's as good a fix as I've come across. It messes around with scripting and IE css expressions to achieve the wanted result, but can be a little hard to memorize.
First of all a little word of warning. This fix will only work for clients who have scripting enabled. The fix makes use of javascript and Alpha Filters (Direct-X), so if your visitors won't or can't support these techniques it will fail. Probably worse is the fact that the fix breaks the css background-position property. In other words, the fix is only useful for images positioned top left (which is the standard background position value). And finally, the fix can become a burden on the performance, so be careful not to overuse it.
What our tool does is look for all pngs in a given css file and apply the fix to all the selectors it finds. Depending on what image formats you prefer to use, the selector list could become quite long and the fix will be applied to a series of selectors that don't need fixing. After applying the fix it's key to make sure that only the needed selectors are making use of it.
So why include this if there's such a high chance of breaking stuff? Well, simply because the code is a bit too complex to memorize, and removing some unneeded selectors is often faster than remembering where it was you last used this fix. Remember, it's purely optional, so if you consider it not worth all the trouble, simply leave it unchecked.
that's all folks
So that's all for the 0.7 release of the IE6 CSS Fixer. For thoughts, comments or suggestions you can always contact us. More updates sooner or later!
Check out v0.7 of the IE6 CSS Fixer.