What is better: CSS hacks or browser detection?

Question

Commonly when I look around the Internet, I find that people are generally using CSS hacks to make their website look the same in all browsers. Personally, I have found this

Answer 1

Personally, I have found this to be quite time consuming to find all of these hacks and test them; each change you make you have to test in 4+ browsers to make sure it didn't break anything else.

You shouldn't have to test 'proper' CSS hacks on every browser.

The idea is that you write standards-compliant code, and then add specific hacks to target one and only one browser (or rendering engine) that makes a mistake. For example, writing "* html #myelement" to target an exception for IE6 only: no other browser will ever be affected by that hack so there's no need to test it exhaustively. It could only go wrong if some new obscure browser came along and made exactly the same mistake as IE6, which is extremely unlikely, not your fault, and something you could expect to get fixed quickly.

There are some things that call themselves CSS hacks but which use invalid constructs, such as the "_propertyname" hack. This can break across browsers because when you use invalid code every browser might interpret it differently. Don't use these.

To be honest, it is in any case not the issue it once was, primarily because IE5 is dead. If you use a Standards Mode doctype and write to the standards, it will mostly work in the current round of browsers. The only real remaining problem case is IE6, which you can target with "* html"; it is unlikely you will need much more in the way of CSS hacks than that. The days of the Box Model Hack are, thankfully, over.