[whatwg] The new content model for <details> breaks rendering in MSIE5-7

Tue Sep 29 12:41:36 PDT 2009

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 2:08 PM, Dean Edwards <dean.edwards at gmail.com> wrote:
> You have two choices to get around the <dd> rendering bug:
>
> 1. The potentially dangerous document.write()
>
> 2. Inserting weird conditional comments into your code:
>
>    </head>
>     <!--[if lt IE 8]><object><!<![endif]-->
>    <body>
>
> I don't like either solution.

The third solution, of course, is just to avoid <details> until IE7
shrinks sufficiently to be ignored.  That won't take too much longer,
and then you can start using it with impunity (aided by a js shim to
give it functionality in the browsers that accept it but don't
implement it yet).

This whole thing is really much less of an issue than the <legend>
problems were, where you'd have to wait for *every* current browser to
phase out, as opposed to just two that are already declining nicely.

After all, we're already happy enough using <div>s or <dl>s or
whatever to implement that functionality.  It would be nice to
immediately start using the new stuff, but the timeline for when it's
viable isn't so long as to be unworkable.  In the meantime, we just
keep doing what we're already doing.

~TJ