CSS Curiosities of the Past

The article details historic CSS hacks that exploited browser parsing quirks, such as the “star hack” (*width) and underscore or hyphen prefixes (_width, -width) which only IE 6–7 recognized, and the misuse of arbitrary !important values like !ie in IE 7 and earlier. It also explains document-level browser detection selectors (e.g., * html {}, *:first-child+html {}), the IE 6–8 “hasLayout” flag that caused float-related collapse, and the clearfix technique using zoom: 1.