IE Conditional Tag

This Rails plugin provides an easy way to insert a tag multiple times in an HTML document with IE conditional comments. This is an alternate approach to conditional stylesheets and CSS hacks, and is explained in detail by Paul Irish.

You can learn more about conditional comments at QuirksMode.

Example

Shown generating the html tag (as recommended), and adding a custom class:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<%= ie_conditional_tag :html, :class => 'some-custom-class' %>
  <head>
      <title>New HTML5 page</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <%= yield %>
  </body>
</html>

This would give you (with some prettied indentation):

<!DOCTYPE html> 
<!--[if lt IE 7]><html class="ie ie6 some-custom-class"><![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 7]><html class="ie ie7 some-custom-class"><![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 8]><html class="ie ie8 some-custom-class"><![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 9]><html class="ie ie9 some-custom-class"><![endif]-->
<!--[if gt IE 9]><html class="ie some-custom-class"><![endif]-->
<!--[if !IE]><!--><html class="some-custom-class"><!--<![endif]--> 
  <head>
      <title>New HTML5 page</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <!-- your content -->
  </body>
</html>

ie_conditional_tag will also accept a block, so this also works:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<%= ie_conditional_tag :html, :class => 'some-custom-class' do %>
  <head>
      <title>New HTML5 page</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <%= yield %>
  </body>
<% end %>

Wait, that's an ugly name!

We aimed for descriptive and agnostic; you may want to add a helper to call it, eg:

module ApplicationHelper

  # ...

  def html_tag(*args, &block)
    ie_conditional_tag(*args, &block)
  end

end

Installation

Use bundler. In your Gemfile:

gem 'ie_conditional_tag'

Install it:

$ bundler install

Then, run the following:

$ rails generate ie_conditional_tag:install

This will add the following initializer:

config/initializers/ie_conditional_tag.rb

You may want to look/tweak the settings there.

Note: By default, when IE 6, 7, 8, 9 are given the CSS classes 'ie6', 'ie7', 'ie8', and 'ie9' respectively. IE > 9 has no additional class added besides 'ie' (which may be overly optimistic). YMMV.

Configuring

For details on how to configure the plugin, see lib/ie_conditional_tag/dsl.rb.

Dependencies

This plugin is only designed to work with Rails 3.0+.

Note: We're happy to accept pull requests that add backwards compatibility with older versions of Rails.