ie6 css fixer v0.3
Since the launch of our ie6 css fixer tool, it's been used a fair few times and we've received some solid feedback from you guys. As stated when it was launched, the first version was an early alpha, so with all the gathered feedback some improvements were made. Today, we present v0.3, this article will give a quick rundown of the fixes, what's still in the pipeline and what dead ends we encountered.
what's new
The main and most important improvement is better css input. In the previous version it was only possible to copy/paste your css into a single textarea, now two new methods were added. First of all you can refer to an online css. Simply paste the url to the online file in the designated field and it will fetch your css online. Handy if you already have a live site or testing environment up. Secondly, it is also possible to upload a local css file. This way, you can save yourself the trouble of copy/pasting the whole deal. Of course, for people already working in a file, the option to copy/paste whatever css that needs to be fixed is still available.
Apart from that, some extra features were added. The tool now supports multiple selectors on 1 line (= comma separated selectors), something that was definitely missing from the alpha release. And the tool also successfully ignores css comment, whole lines as well as commented values. This helps to minimize the rubbish code as much as possible.
what's next
We are still looking into ways to improve the css input. One thing we're exploring is the inclusion of the @import statement. This way, multiple stylesheet could be checked at once (though a limit will always exist). Furthermore, it would be cool to simply crawl through an online (x)html file, filter all css element and fix that as a whole. It would then be possible to simply list a url to a regular online page and our fixer would do the rest.
And we are of course still looking to include new ie6 fixes. Suggestions are always welcome.
dead ends
span {display:block;} .date {margin-left:-1em;} /* set to a span */ Sadly we've run into some dead ends too. At first we'd hoped to filter out some rules that needn't be fixed. For example, a span or a element are inline elements and won't benefit from zoom:1 fixes, so they could be filtered. This would of course not be true if they were set explicitly to display:block, and finding that out without the html code at hand is simply impossible (as the example above illustrates).
So for the time being, unless we find something to counter this, we will not put our time into filtering out unnecessary fixes and cleaning up the code. The original scope is clear enough and still stands, clean css code is not our priority, and since we have virtually no sure way of knowing whether a fix is absolute, we'd rather not guess and make a complete mess of the output.
that's it for now
A little thank you to all the people who've given their opinion and provided feedback. And as for the discussion whether this tool came too late, I still believe that it serves a purpose as ie6 users haven't died out yet and 10%-20% is still a big deal that deserves consideration. I agree that this tool would've been a lot cooler if it had been released one or two years earlier, but that just isn't the case.
Stay tuned for more news later. As for now, check out IE6 CSS Fixer v0.3