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Article:
The Vanishing Image: XHTML 2 Migration Issues
Subject: Use of Conditional Comments
Date: 2003-07-04 07:46:18
From: MikeyC Cacciottolo
Response to: Use of Conditional Comments
"You can embed the conditional comments like this:
<!-- [if !IE] -->
<object></object>
<!-- <![endif] -->"


Your example doesn't work. You can't use conditional comments in that manner.

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  • Use of Conditional Comments
    2003-07-04 14:37:27 Florian Bauer [Reply]

    I double-checked my example. It does indeed work, at least with the german version of IE 6. I have no idea whether this hack will work with any other version of IE. What version of IE did you use for testing?

    • Use of Conditional Comments
      2003-07-04 20:50:34 MikeyC Cacciottolo [Reply]

      IE6 sp1 - english running on Windows NT &
      IE6 sp1 - english running on Windows XP


      Here is the exact example I used (and I just double-checked it):


      <!-- [if !IE] -->
      i can see this in Internet Explorer
      <!-- <![endif] -->


      • Use of Conditional Comments
        2003-07-05 04:38:08 Florian Bauer [Reply]

        That is strange:
        Here is my example:


        <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
        <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="de" lang="de">
        <head>
        </head>
        <body>


        <!--[if !IE]> -->
        IE doesn't see this.
        <!-- <![endif] -->


        </body>
        </html>


        I checked this with ie6 on winxp, and ie5.5 on win98, both in the german version.
        I also tried your example and the conditional comments do also work there.
        strange...
        cheers
        Florian

        • Use of Conditional Comments
          2003-07-06 16:17:35 MikeyC Cacciottolo [Reply]

          I just realized something else. The example we've been playing with thus far uses a transitional doctype as it doesn't validate using a strict doctype. Something about character data not being allowed there according to the validator.


          XHTML 2 won't have a transitional mode (as far as I'm aware), so it seems that you can't use conditional comments anyways to deal with IE's broken Object support.


          Please correct me if I'm wrong.

          • Re: Use of Conditional Comments
            2003-10-16 18:09:25 Lenny D [Reply]

            "I just realized something else. The example we've been playing with thus far uses a transitional doctype as it doesn't validate using a strict doctype. Something about character data not being allowed there according to the validator."


            XHTML does not allow character data at the <body> level. It must be within a block level element such as

            .



        • Use of Conditional Comments
          2003-07-05 11:25:34 MikeyC Cacciottolo [Reply]

          I've isolated the problem. Your original example was:
          <!-- [if !IE] -->
          <object></object>
          <!-- <![endif] -->


          Your follow-up example was (notice there is no space before the opening bracket of the if statement):


          <!--[if !IE] -->
          <object></object>
          <!-- <![endif] -->


          Your second example is indeed correct. Why do trhings have to be so confusing ;)

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