Design, development and dollars from Tim Spangler

It’s a sad, sad fact that the various versions of Internet Explorer still command a 57% marketshare in the browser world. Yes, supporting that craptastic pile of kludged-together code, with its hundreds of security holes and complete disregard for web standards, is a complete nightmare that has added hours upon hours to the development of this very page. Debugging pages in IE is almost enough to make me question why I want to do web development for a living. But there’s a way to whittle away at IE’s marketshare and (as I’ll mention later), make a bit of money in the process.

Making use of conditional comments

Conditional comments keep web developers sane. They’re only interpreted by IE and allow developers to section off IE-only code, allowing them to keep a page standards-compliant while still intentionally breaking their code so Internet Explorer’s completely b0rked engine will render it correctly. You can even choose which version or versions of IE to target!Conditional comments look a lot like standard HTML comments, with a bit of simple code added. For example, say you want to use a JavaScript hack to fix IE6’s handling of transparent PNG files. Clearly you should only burden the IE6 user with having to download this extra code, so use a conditional comment like this:

<!--[if IE 6]>
    <script defer type="text/javascript" src="js/png_fix.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

That’s it: IE6 will parse the comment and will go on to download png_fix.js. Using defer when referencing the script will cause the browser to wait until the page is done rendering before executing it, avoiding some funky-looking effects when applying this particular hack.

Caveats

There’s only one catch to conditional comments: if you’re running multiple versions of IE on the same machine, the comment wil be evaluated as the highest version you have installed, no matter which one you’re testing from. To get around this, you can use a Windows XP virtual machine with IE6 installed, which is graciously provided by Microsoft themselves. After subjecting the world to their sub-par browser, it’s the least they can do.

Making money with conditional comments

Yes, it’s possible to make money off something as nerdy as this. Google AdSense publishers have long enjoyed a hybrid CPA system called “Referrals,” which is like Google’s answer to Commission Junction. One of the offers in the AdSense CPA program pays $1 for getting people to switch to Firefox. Using a conditional comment at the top of your page to display a banner for this offer only to IE users gives you 100% targeted traffic, many of whom have likely heard of the benefits of Firefox before and were waiting for the “right moment” to switch. It won’t make you rich, but it’s a nice little tip for doing your part to chip away at the market dominance of a bottom-tier browser.

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