GoKawiilCSS quirks reveal decades of browser-specific hacks like IE's 'star hack'
A retrospective catalogs odd, non-standard CSS behaviors that browsers—especially old versions of Internet Explorer—have accepted over the years, such as property prefixes with asterisks, underscores, or hyphens, and near-arbitrary strings after an exclamation mark being treated as !important. These tricks let developers target specific browsers at a time when CSS lacked conditional logic and browser rendering was wildly inconsistent.
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These hacks illustrate how fragmented browser implementations forced developers into fragile workarounds rather than relying on standards, shaping defensive coding practices that persisted for years. Understanding this history helps explain why modern CSS specifications emphasize strict, predictable parsing and why legacy hacks can still linger in old codebases as technical debt.
- Internet Explorer 6 and 7 famously misparsed CSS property prefixes, enabling browser-targeting hacks like the 'star hack'.
- Since CSS files couldn't use HTML-style conditional comments, developers exploited invalid syntax quirks to target specific browsers.
- IE7 and earlier treated many arbitrary strings after '!' as !important, a bug developers weaponized with tricks like '!ie'.
CSS: The Definitive Guide by Eric Meyer — If a tour of star hacks and IE-era CSS oddities has you curious about how the language actually works today, Eric Meyer's CSS: The Definitive Guide is the classic deep dive. It walks through selectors, the cascade, and layout in detail, making it a great companion for anyone who enjoys the history and the modern specs alike.
See CSS: The Definitive Guide by Eric Meyer on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.Source: vale.rocks — Declan Chidlow, 2026-09-11
Published there as: “CSS Curiosities of the Past”
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