SMRTR ProgrammingSep 10, 2026Lobsters

Antiquated CSS and why we needed it

SMRTR summary

A nostalgic deep dive into the CSS hacks developers relied on during the IE-dominated era — star hacks, underscore hacks, clearfix tricks, and AlphaImageLoader filters. These workarounds exploited parser bugs and proprietary Microsoft behavior to survive cross-browser development. Modern CSS has quietly replaced all of it with clean, spec-compliant solutions, but the old stylesheets left behind fossils of every browser war ever fought.

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