Yesterday, I was surprised to read that a fellow Brit, Dean Edwards, has (retrospecively) conquered older versions of Internet Explorer’s poor handling of cascading style sheets.

Most web designers will have seen the pie chart depicting the proportion of their time spent dealing with various aspects of the job. Of course, the biggest piece of the pie is getting your pages “to work in Internet f****** Explorer”. Dean has invested a lot of time creating a javascript library which, when applied using IE’s conditional comments to versions 6 and under, causes the flawed browsers to convert the CSS to something they understand.

I’ve only just started to play with it, but already I’m impressed. The manual says that there is a performance hit involved, so it may not always be appropriate to use, but this may just be the magic bullet developers have wanted for a long time.