Conditional comments or IE specific hacks [duplicate]

This question already has answers here: Detecting IE version using 开发者_如何学JAVACSS Capability/Feature Detection (18 answers) Closed 4 months ago.

So in my interweb travels of evaluating other programmer's CSS I've noticed a bunch of people using the underscore or asterisk hack that is vendor specific to IE browsers for debugging purposes though W3C does not parse this as valid CSS.

I personally prefer comment conditionals where you can at least defer to IE specific CSS that is valid but I guess the only issue with that would be addition of extra CSS.

So I'm curious about a consensus of what you prefer and the positive or negative implications of each method.

Comment conditonals or IE vendor specific hacks?

PS - Honestly this should be titled do you support IE layout or not :-)

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Conditional style sheets are the way to go. The word hack itself implies that you're doing something that you shouldn't. But a few short words on both:

Conditional style sheets

• (+) Cleaner CSS code
• (+) Easier to manage
• (+)Easiey to understand for other developers
• (+) CSS validates
• (-)More CSS files (thus more server load)

Hacks

• (+) Faster (possibly)
• (-) Messes up your CSS
• (-) CSS doesn't validate
• (-) Very unclear for other developers (especially non-experienced one's)
• (-) Could cause problems with newer versions of IE

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I prefer the conditional comments, because it makes your page still validate. I could imagine, however, that you use the vendor hacks, because you won't need an extra css file, saving a request per page loaded (if not for caching, of course). Then again, the css files are cached, and if you use your conditionals wisely, you can make a separate file per IE version, copying hacks if they are needed for more than one version. That way, you need at most one extra css per page, which is then cached as well, thus minimizing the extra load.