Internet Explorer 6 css hacks cause validation warnings

[anonymous]

Firefox's WebDeveloper plugin gives following warning in trac.css.

Warning: Error in parsing value for property 'display'.  Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://myserver/trac/heppa/chrome/common/css/trac.css
Line: 66

The offending code is this (the line starting with * html):

@media screen {
 a.ext-link .icon {
  background: url(../extlink.gif) left center no-repeat;
  padding-left: 16px;
 }
 * html a.ext-link .icon { display: inline-block; }
}

[Tim Hatch]

That is a workaround for IE5-6 to allow the inline anchor to have padding. The "* html" causes most browsers to ignore that definition entirely since there is no element outside html, except in IE.

We should eventually move to conditional comments to allow better browsers to not have to download the IE6 workarounds and I don't remember a prior ticket on the issue so I'm targeting it at "the future." Thanks for the report.

[Christopher Lenz]

I don't think this is a problem. CSS defines parse error recovery routines quite precisely, which can be used for things such as CSS filters. Conditional comments are IMO not a cleaner solution for this (I ​blogged about this topic some time ago).