Conditional Comments within CSS

Question

I am currently developing a theme for a homepage but ran into a few problems. For whatever reason I have no access to editing the html code itself, and I need to write custom .c

Answer 1

You might want to look into this article which explains how to use conditional comments to set classes on the html element. You can then use that class to target specific browsers in your stylesheet, in a clean way.

Your html tag would look something like this:

Edit 2

Since the announcement that IE10 will not support conditional comments I though it would be nice to update this answer. I tested the type of comments it will support and it seems that the above will still work, but if you want to target higher than 10 or only 10 you will be out of luck. As suggested by Microsoft themselves on their blog (link in comments @MarcoDemaio) you should use feature detection.

Then you can do something like this in your css:

.somestyle {
    background: transparent url('derp.jpg') no-repeat;
}

/* ie6 fallsback class */
.ie6 .somestyle {
    background: #eee; 
}

Read the article, and good luck ;)

Edit 2:

Since IE7 isn't my greatest concern anymore and IE9 is pretty consistent in its behaviour I can get away wil just the following code (which will add a class only for IE versions less than IE9):

Edit 1:

Ok I managed to miss your "can't edit html" comment.

In that case you can only use browser specific hacks, I think they're dirty as hell but hey, if you have no other option......

Somthing like this:

.someclass {
    *color: blue; /* IE 7 and below */
    _color: blue; /* IE 6 */
}

/* IE6, IE7 - asterisk hack */
.someclass  { *color: blue; }

/* IE8 - winning hack */
.someclass  { color: blue\0/; } /* must be last declaration in the selector's ruleset */