Plenty has been written about CSS hacks for IE, most commonly about the problems with earlier versions of IE (versions 7 and earlier) not being standards compliant--so far off that a lot of work had to be done in code in order to make a page work properly with CSS in those browsers.

Recently I had a different sort of problem with a legacy shopping cart and the pages that run it when viewed with IE8. The pages were updated to a new design, but in the process the menu bar graphic appeared twice (one directly under the other) and although the menu items were listed within the second bar, on the blank bar above the same links also worked even though the menu items were not listed there. This only happened with IE 8. Not Opera, not FireFox, Not Chrome, not IE7... only IE8.

At the time I was snowed under with deadlines and could not spend a lot of time fiddling with it to get it right. I needed a quick fix, but looking through various sites brought up nothing particularly helpful. Tracking down issues like this can sometimes take a long time, and I did not have time to spend. But I did come across something extremely useful for a quick fix that ameliorated the situation and satisfied the customer until I had time to dig further into the problem.

IE8 apparently has a feature under its tools menu called "Compatibility View." This only works when IE8 senses a compatibility problem (which right away convinces me that the developers of the browser knew it would have issues... it's about time Microsoft came up with a browser that actually meets web design standards).

If you click on it, you can add the site in question to a list of sites with  "compatibility issues" so that every time you browse that site with IE8, you'll see that site as it looks in IE7. This was exactly the problem with the site I was working on, and I found that it fixed the problem. However, that's not going to help with all users, it only helped on one computer. I mention it here because while it's not a perfect emulation of the site viewed through IE7, it may help viewing older legacy sites.

What I finally found was another item that did the trick... until I can fix it properly. This came down to using a specialized meta tag, which emulates the page in IE7.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7">

The page looks fine for now, and will be okay long enough for me to figure out the problem and get it fixed.