How to Do Browser Specific Conditional CSS Inside a *.CSS File

Is there a way to do browser specific conditional CSS inside a *.css file?

There is a way to do it in IE by taking advantage of bugs in the browser and @import. The best method I've seen is here, courtesy of bobince (and definitely beat out my answer, heh).

In general though, no. Even conditional comments are browser-specific to IE.

CSS method to include IE6 hacks

Is it possible to combine them like

* html @import url(ie6hacks.css);

No. at-rules like @import are not selectors, so cannot be combined with other selectors.

There are ways to make at-rules work as hacks, for example this:

@import url(/* no! */iehacks.css);

will be loaded by IE6/7 but not the other browsers. However, I wouldn't recommend using it; this sort of thing can be really fragile. This particular example is also invalid CSS.

As Daniel says, if you want separate .css files for hacks, the best approach is a conditionally-included link tag. The beauty of “* html” is that you can put hack-rules in the same stylesheet, which is easier to manage if there are only a few of them; if you're having a separate style sheet anyway, it offers no advantage.

IMO “* html” for IE6 is the only hack it's still legitimate to use today. All the box model stuff is dead along with IE5 — assuming you're not using IE6 Quirks Mode, which you shouldn't — and the other browsers, even IE7, are generally too good to be able to attack with a simple hack; the few hacks that can target them are too complex/fragile/invalid to really use.

(And as the inventor of the Simplified Box Model Hack, I say a hearty good riddance to them.)

Put browser specific condition in CSS selector

Try this out:

*line-height:10px;  //* is hack for IE7
line-height:10px\0/;  //\0/ is hack for IE8
line-height:10px\9; //\9 is hack for IE9
//below is the hack for chrome and safari browsers 
@media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0)
{
    line-height:10px;
}

Conditional inline CSS for different browser chrome & firefox

I wrote a test page, did not find what you said this situation.
maybe you write a test page.
Strictly speaking, firefox chrome is the standard of modern browers, should not have this kind of situation has.

*{ margin:0; padding:0;}
body{font:12px/1.5 arial;background:#fff;}
.test{background-color: white; border-style: outset; margin: 115px 0px 0px -40px;}

<div class="test"></div>

demo here

Can you use if/else conditions in CSS?

Not in the traditional sense, but you can use classes for this, if you have access to the HTML. Consider this:

<p class="normal">Text</p>

<p class="active">Text</p>

and in your CSS file:

p.normal {
  background-position : 150px 8px;
}
p.active {
  background-position : 4px 8px;
}

That's the CSS way to do it.

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Then there are CSS preprocessors like Sass. You can use conditionals there, which'd look like this:

$type: monster;
p {
  @if $type == ocean {
    color: blue;
  } @else if $type == matador {
    color: red;
  } @else if $type == monster {
    color: green;
  } @else {
    color: black;
  }
}

Disadvantages are, that you're bound to pre-process your stylesheets, and that the condition is evaluated at compile time, not run time.

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A newer feature of CSS proper are custom properties (a.k.a. CSS variables). They are evaluated at run time (in browsers supporting them).

With them you could do something along the line:

:root {
  --main-bg-color: brown;
}

.one {
  background-color: var(--main-bg-color);
}

.two {
  background-color: black;
}

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Finally, you can preprocess your stylesheet with your favourite server-side language. If you're using PHP, serve a style.css.php file, that looks something like this:

p {
  background-position: <?php echo (@$_GET['foo'] == 'bar')? "150" : "4"; ?>px 8px;
}

In this case, you will however have a performance impact, since caching such a stylesheet will be difficult.

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