It's the End of CSS hacks as We Know It...

P.I.E.'s article"CSS Hacks and IE7 and the oh so popular post on the IE Blog "Call to action: The demise of CSS hacks and broken pages" has made me think and desire to post what I have been thinking about all of this. I have also read various posts referring the the later and a common theme I am hearing is stop hacking your CSS because IE7 is coming. I do not ascribe to this thought at all.

It seems that with IE7 coming that we might actually be able to count IE7 as a modern browser.... What did I just say? I said that we might be able to count IE7 as a "modern" browser. This is very welcome and strongly desired by the web developer community. Does IE7 mean the end of CSS hacks? No! Does it mean that we will have to hack for IE7? If IE7 has truly joined the ranks of modern browsers then we will not have to. This is a wonderful prospect. However, the need to hack for legacy browsers: IE5, IE6, and older versions of Netscape and Opera, and others will still remain depending on the users of your site. If all of your IE users instantly convert to IE7 as soon as it is publicly available count yourself lucky, but I do not think that this is going to be the rule for what happens, especially in the Enterprise sector, until it has been out for a while and the side effects are known and it has been well tested with their web based applications

IE7 does not mean the end of CSS hacks as we know it, but may be a harbinger that in the future years when most everyone has have upgraded their PCs to get rid of old versions of legacy browsers and most everyone is using IE7 and updated versions of Firefox or Opera then hacks may be a thing of the past. I look forward to the day but it is not going to be any time in the very, very near future.