Working on a moderately complex layout for a site, and I'm trying to figure out the logically and conceptually tidiest way to have IE5 (and lower) completely ignore all the stylesheets.
My goal is to have the "good" stylesheet with the works in it, to be used by any decent browser plus IE8, for IE6 & 7 to get a second stylesheet that overrides some of the stuff they don't support properly, and have anything older completely ignore the stylesheets and get a bare page.
The IE6&7 is accomplished easily enough with a conditional comment (loathe as I am to use those, they do validate), and it shouldn't be too much of a hassle to override some of the fancier directives for those browsers in an anti-sheet.
The problem is that I want to have <IE6 ignore the stylesheet entirely without having to do a whole huge anti-stylesheet. (Also Netscape 4 and older, but that's easy by just using a media declaration.)
Google is thus far failing me--the best solution I've managed to Google up is the old highpass filter, which I don't want to use both for the fact that it's visually and conceptually nasty, and that it requires at best a completely unnecessary HTTP call to fetch the empty stylesheet--I'd rather have the 0.4% of users with IE5 get an unreadable mess than add that overhead to every page request.
Is there some nice, tidy, valid way to do this that my weak Google-fu is failing to find?
(On an unrelated side note, I am so happy to see IE6 drop below 5% in my statistics--the day it hits 1% will be the day I throw a party.)
My goal is to have the "good" stylesheet with the works in it, to be used by any decent browser plus IE8, for IE6 & 7 to get a second stylesheet that overrides some of the stuff they don't support properly, and have anything older completely ignore the stylesheets and get a bare page.
The IE6&7 is accomplished easily enough with a conditional comment (loathe as I am to use those, they do validate), and it shouldn't be too much of a hassle to override some of the fancier directives for those browsers in an anti-sheet.
The problem is that I want to have <IE6 ignore the stylesheet entirely without having to do a whole huge anti-stylesheet. (Also Netscape 4 and older, but that's easy by just using a media declaration.)
Google is thus far failing me--the best solution I've managed to Google up is the old highpass filter, which I don't want to use both for the fact that it's visually and conceptually nasty, and that it requires at best a completely unnecessary HTTP call to fetch the empty stylesheet--I'd rather have the 0.4% of users with IE5 get an unreadable mess than add that overhead to every page request.
Is there some nice, tidy, valid way to do this that my weak Google-fu is failing to find?
(On an unrelated side note, I am so happy to see IE6 drop below 5% in my statistics--the day it hits 1% will be the day I throw a party.)