Hide CSS from MSIE 4.72 (methods for IE4 don't work)

[Stan Brown]

Standard advice -- even given here recently -- for hiding CSS from
MSIE 4.x is to enclose the styles in @media { ... }. The same advice
is given at [1].

Unfortunately, it doesn't work with MSIE 4.72 (Win 98). That version
quite happily reads the stylesheets and then mangles the
presentation. It's really horrible -- even on a simple page like
http://www.acad.sunytccc.edu/instruct/sbrown/
(The college name and address should be on two lines top aligned
just right of the logo; the table should be horizontally centered
with internal text left aligned.)

Apparently 4.72 is different somehow from other 4.x. Though it's not
noted as an exception on [1], it _is_ noted as an exception on the
companion page [2].

I've googled without success -- lots of Q&A on hiding from MSIE 4.x,
but none that I found addressed specific problems with 4.72.

I've given up on getting pages to look decent in MSIE 4;(*) now my
goal is just to disable stylesheets for MSIE 4 -- all versions
including 4.72. Anyone know how to do it?

(*) I spent most of yesterday trying to follow the advice at [3] for
centering tables, but could not get it to work in MSIE 4.72 even
though it is stated to work in MSIE 4.x.

[1] http://w3development.de/css/hide_css...rowsers/media/
[2] http://w3development.de/css/hide_css...owsers/import/
[3] http://theodorakis.net/tablecentertest.html Example II g.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[kchayka]

Stan Brown wrote:

I've given up on getting pages to look decent in MSIE 4;(*) now my
goal is just to disable stylesheets for MSIE 4 -- all versions
including 4.72. Anyone know how to do it?

I've had success with the following combination:

1. Link to a browser-safe stylesheet, pretty much limited to page colors
and font suggestions.
2. In the linked stylesheet, import the advanced rules with syntax:
@import "/path-to/stylesheet.css";
3. In the imported stylesheet, include media types:
@media screen, projection { rules }

This combo hides a lot from a number of CSS-challenged browsers. I did
find, however, that the @media rule also hides from Mac IE 5 and
Konqueror 2.2 (but not Konq3), which is unfortunate but is the lesser of
various evils, IMO. But... I recently stumbled upon a method to
"unhide" @media rules from MacIE by including a box-model hack:

@media screen, projection {
..dummy {
voice-family: "\"}\"";
voice-family: inherit;
}
[Mac IE now sees everything that follows]

HTH

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[Stan Brown]

In article <sw*******************@newsb.telia.net> in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets, Tina Holmboe
<ti**@greytower.net> wrote:

At first glance it would seem to me that your best bet is to send an
IE 4-specific stylesheet. This would probably involve some server-side
processing[*].
Not an option, I'm afraid. I have zero input to what the server
does.
No, a client-side method using scripting isn't useful. Users of
IE 4 are also allowed to turn off Javascript.

I would never embrace a Javascript solution anyway, because of the
numerous security holes.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[Tina Holmboe]

Stan Brown <th************@fastmail.fm> exclaimed in <MP************************@news.odyssey.net>:

At first glance it would seem to me that your best bet is to send an
IE 4-specific stylesheet. This would probably involve some server-side
processing[*].

Not an option, I'm afraid. I have zero input to what the server
does.

Unless you can serve up the stylesheet from a different server, ie.
using the method outlined in the article I quoted but placing the
scripts on server you have control over, there is very little you
can do.

Well, nothing I know of anyway ...

No, a client-side method using scripting isn't useful. Users of
IE 4 are also allowed to turn off Javascript.

I would never embrace a Javascript solution anyway, because of the
numerous security holes.

*So* in agreement.

--
- Tina Holmboe Greytower Technologies
ti**@greytower.net http://www.greytower.net/
[+46] 0708 557 905