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OK, so I’m sure you’re all going to respond “Like, that’s so last week!”, but maybe this will help someone. It certainly would have helped me, had I not just discovered it for myself only 10 minutes ago!
Testing. Joy, oh joy. It’s a necessary evil, but made just slightly less enjoyable by the fact that each version of Internet Explorer wants exclusive access to the machine it’s installed on. Until a year or so ago, IE versions just didn’t install and behave well together.
But a couple of years ago, some clever chaps worked out how to get them all working standalone. It was very cool work. Allowed us to test lots of things on one box. But they weren’t without their faults, and I’d heard they didn’t work so well with IE 7, as the conditional comments method got screwed so it didn’t behave quite the same as on boxes with only one version installed. But not only has this problem been fixed by some cunning registry work and experiments, but also someone’s very very kindly put together an installer that bundles up and installs (and uninstalls!) the whole lot, from IE3 through to 6! How nice? Very!
OK, so here’s the magic link to joyous easy testing: http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE
And here’s the article with great breakdowns of how to actually use conditional comments and get them working with IE again: http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/multiIE.html
If the discussion is a bit technical, just scan down to the tables… sorry, pictures. Er, yes, it might be really useful info, but it’s a picture, with a rather less than helpful alt text of “Screenshot of testing CCs with IE6” Hmm. Work to do here. It’s all a little complicated anyway, so here’s a summary:
If you’re not sure how conditional comments work, check out About Conditional Comments from Microsoft’s site. They’re a tool that pretty much enables you to eliminate all the nasty hacks you would otherwise need to cope with the various forms of Internet Explorer that people still seem intent on using.
The key interesting nugget is that IE5.5 doesn’t match to the expression “IE 5.5”, which you would have thought it would, given that it is. But some clever chap (Thierry Koblentz at TJKDesign) worked out that it does match to 5.5000! So, here’s my summary of the rather inaccessible and overly complete tables:
You can obviously use the exclaimation mark for NOT, lt, lte, gt and gte too - just putting in the appropriate number, and remembering to use 5.5000 if required. You can also target versions 4 and 3 if you really want to, but only if you really really want to - It’s not good for your health.
The article by Manfred has loads more examples of what you can do with conditional comments - some of which are almost too clever, but might dig you out of a hole.