I try to avoid using too many hacks, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. I use conditional comments to load a transparent PNG image hack for IE6 and IE5.5.

However, another thing I like to do is reset CSS files. I wrote a quick tutorial about it on my site. You might find it useful.

I get a migraine just thinking about the migraines IE-6 gives me! :-()

But, I’ve learned that after a while of dealing with IE-6 that one can begin to do layouts that take IE-6’s quirks out of the picture.

One simple example, IE-6’s doubling of margins when a margin and float are in the same direction. Instead of using margin, just use padding and the problem goes away.

Of course that doesn’t work all the time but I’ve found that with some planning and understanding of IE-6’s problems, complex layouts can be had without a single “hack”.

But then again, when all else fails, the “hack” I like the best is to put an underscore in front of a property name, which then only IE-6 will see. That I use only for testing though, for the final layout I’ll move all the IE-6 only properties and values to an IE-6 only style sheet and then Conditional Comment it in.

Thanks for pointing out this solution, it saves us web designers a lot of migraines!

I’m also a great fan of Slidy and S5 both pure HTML/CSS multi-media presentations .