Recipe 9.5 Keeping CSS Rules from Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh

Problem

You want to hide certain rules from Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh.

Solution

To hide CSS rules from Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh, insert a backslash in front of the closing comment with the characters */:

/* \*/
h1 { 
 font-size: 200%; 
 text-transform: uppercase;
 background-color: #666;
 }

After the rules pertaining to Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh, insert another comment line:

/* */
p { 
 text-transform: uppercase;
}

Discussion

This method exploits a simple comment-parsing problem found in Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh. The backslash before the closing comment causes the browser to think the comment actually has not closed; any valid CSS rules are hidden, allowing entire rule sets to be hidden from the browser until the next closing comment marker is hidden.

See Also

The specification about adding comments in CSS at http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/CR-CSS21-20040225/syndata.html#comments.