HTML5 Parsing in IE10 – IEBlog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs.
There’s a bunch of information about how IE10 will be handling HTML5, but the bit that sticks out to me is that IE will no longer support Conditional Comments as of version 10.
Conditional Comments have been a controversial issue since becoming widely adopted as a method of avoiding CSS hacks. I, for one, have stood behind Conditional Comments fot some time and use them in sites to this day. As with all things though, Conditional Comments have been abused over time, which likely put a bad taste in the mouths of many developers.
I think that the IE team deciding to drop Conditional Comments speaks to the fact that they’re doing all they can to adhere and become more relevant given their lifespan thus far.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had to write maybe a CSS declaration or two targeted only at Internet Explorer, but I’m hoping by the time IE10 comes out, that average drops even further.
Comments
i really really really really hope they get everything right in IE10. i’m not holding my breath though.
After reading the article, they aren’t completely dropping support for conditional comments, you just can’t use them to target IE10. You can still conditional comments to target IE <= 9. As long as they continue to improve their support of the specs, we shouldn't have to target IE10 anyway.
While I have used them out of need. I think the face we had to use a proprietary solution like that was the abuse – it’s not just on the developers who abused it. Instead of fixing the core problem, they gave us conditional comments – and now they are taking them away. It was a proprietary patch to put lipstick on a pig.
I am glad to see them go away, but I am more glad to see that the core of things is getting fixed – which is what matters. We are slowly not going to need the conditional comments anyway.