Solving Glyphicon Support In IE7

Yes, I am talking about IE7 support. If you don't care about half of the how and why, you can just scroll down to my solution. If you care a little bit more about why I came up with this solution, read on.

The Backstory

Bootstrap has become a staple to websites like salt and pepper have to a dining room table and while most of the world developers have moved on to Bootstrap 3, my current project is reveling in Bootstrap 2.3. To some this may seem like a travesty, but I have good reasons for it, the most prominent being required IE7 support, and that is where the reasoning ends in this post.

Actually, if I really think about it, this blog deals less with me being on Bootstrap 2.3 for this application, and more with the Glyphicons used in Bootstrap 3. Why? Well, I had a need for Glyphicons from BS 3 in our BS 2 application so, like any good developer would do, I ported them over. Done. Well, kinda...

Refresh CSS without refreshing your page

I've been using Visual Studio 2013 for several months now and one of the new features I was enjoying was Browser Link. Since I have been implementing the front end for a project, I have been using Web Essentials for VS 2013 with all the CSS built using LESS. While I have used more complex and advanced LESS compilers, it's got a nice integration into Visual Studio with pretty solid support, and the developer has been keeping it well updated. It's nice because I can play in my browser, move my changes into my "main.less" file right in VS, fire off a Shift+Alt+Y shortcut combo, and my LESS files are compiled into my "main.css" file. With Browser Link, the page detects the change and refreshes with the CSS updates. Voila!

Now, anyone who read that with a keen eye would have noticed the use of the word "was" in the opening sentence. A past progressive verb! This means I am not "enjoying" the feature anymore.