I’ve been meaning to blog this for a while having come across the problem on a project last year. When including conditional comments in a page rendered using XSL templates the comment has to be structured in a way that doesn’t break the stylesheet. While this sounds simple it took a few attempts to get a working solution.

<xsl:comment>[if lte IE 6]<![CDATA[>]]>
   &lt;link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles.css" /&gt;
<![CDATA[<![endif]]]></xsl:comment>

The comment must be structured inside an <xsl:comment> block which, when rendered to the browser, becomes a standard html comment and the greater than and less than brackets on the stylesheet link itself must be entered using their respective character entity codes “>” and “<“.

Conditional comments are Microsoft’s preffered answer to the differing levels of CSS support in Internet Explorer. I came across a problem recently however, when using xsl templates, where placing the html comment tags directly into the xsl was having no effect.

The issue seems to occur because the html comments in the xsl template, along with their contents, are not rendered to the browser.

The answer is to structure the conditional comment using xsl comment tags, which translate into html comments when the page is rendered, as follows:

What, no redesign? Um… yes, I’m running a little late on this I know. It seems my PHP skills are a little rusty so it’s taken me longer than I expected to get to grips with the wordpress template theme engine. I hope to get the new site up in the next few days so stay tuned!

As I’ve been a bit starved of design work at my day job of late I thought I would take the opportunity to vent my creative spleen by creating a fancy pants new design for the Concept Fusion blog as well as finally getting my portfolio site up.

Look out on November 1st (CSS Reboot day) for the first stage of the new design, with the portfolio to follow soon after. Sneek peek below:

A very acurate representation of the web development process I think… that would be funnier if it weren't so true!

I agree completey with the "trying to get the layout working using only CSS before giving up and using tables" part. There are still one or two very frustrating shortcomings with CSS that have given me many a float nightmare!
Via Poisoned Minds