If you have ever done web development, especially web design, you know that almost 50% of all development time goes to make CSS work for all the browsers. And, of course, Internet Explorer is the most non-complaint browser out there. Not only that, but it also lacks backward compatibility – so some features that work in IE6, would either break or what they call it “work differently” in IE7 and of course work another way in IE5.
One way around that would be to write a custom Java Script redirector that would determine what browser the client uses and redirected to the correct CSS. Another one, is to write a custom JavaScript that actually implements the functionality of all different browsers and makes sure everything is W3 compliant no matter what browser the client uses.
The problem in a second approach is that usually developers tend to write that JavaScript file only for a limited set of features that their application (web site) uses, and hence their JavaScript files are hardly reusable by others.
However, recently one of my good friends and developers discovered an open source JavaScript library – ie7-js, which is hosted on code.google.com and has an MIT License. This 70Kb library implements all the W3 features, which means it is highly reusable, and it makes web development to be a much much easier task, since developers do not need to worry about cross browser (at least from IE perspective), as this library supports ALL versions of Internet Explorer (5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0 +). Which makes it universal for any web development project.
Enjoy and reuse the cross-browser wisdom!
