What is the common practice for maintaining IE workarounds in a separate CSS file? I'm talking about deeper issues that are impractical to work out by other means (such as including an alternative image url along with a base64-encoded embedded resource; boxsizing.htc workaround etc.) NB: I'm conservative when considering dataURI vs vanilla spriting, so there are only a few
Sometimes I have to resort to code similar to
.some-class-lets-say-datepicker {
background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,/*encoded image*/);
*background-image: url(../gfx/lets-say-datepicker-icon.png);
}
with the encoded image string being on average 100~300 chars. Given the code above, this causes some redundand traffic - for compliant browsers to download the redundand URL, and for IE7 to download the base64 stringon top of the separate image request. I find this overhead to be insignificant for both (and, after all, IE7 users have much bigger issues to be worried about :)
At the same time the following would (?) be a lot cleaner:
<!--[if !IE]> -->
<link href="main.css" rel="stylesheet" />
<!-- <![endif]-->
<!--[if lt IE 8]>
<link href="main_ie.css" rel="stylesheet"/>
<![endif]-->
but separate maintenance does not seem appealing at all. Closure-stylesheets offer conditionals, is there something similar for SASS/LESS or is there a different approach altogether that you'd recommend?