Have I mentioned I hate IE?

[chipotle]

Because I do. Really. Why?

1. Futz around with XML templates.
2. Futz around with CSS.
3. Get things looking good in real browsers.
4. Try to get PNG hack to work gracefully in IE.
5. Realize CSS is broken in IE. Fix CSS.
6. Fix has broken CSS in real browsers. Make both happy.
7. IE for Windows, running on a PC on the other side of the house, isn’t happy with CSS. Make it happy. Make sure all other browsers are happy.
8. Fill out the rest of the site’s templates and “forms” (the term Textpattern uses for modules it builds pages from, which confusingly have nothing to do with the form tag in HTML).
9. Create Javascript solution to PNG problem, which creates unnecessary dependency on Javascript. Create PHP solution that doesn’t work.
10. Make site look, if not perfect, pretty darn good.
11. Fix PHP solution. Ha! No Javascript.
12. Discover IE for Windows has broken in new and different ways, as blocks which once respected the float CSS property no longer do. Check other web sites which work and fail to find any differerence other than the obvious (i.e., they work).
13. Spew extended paragraphs aloud which involve the phrase “f••kity f••k” repeatedly. Hope neighbors are not listening.

This has been my week so far. When I’m not screaming in frustration, it’s kind of fun. I think. Maybe. I suspect I’m trying to make this too “perfect,” for some value of perfect that remains ill-defined. I waffle between “this is far too plain-looking” and “adding more to it would make it busy,” suspecting that there’s a certain truth in both. I may yet add a subtle background rather than pure white, but it would have to be, well, subtle. That’s probably in the “final flourish” stage rather than the design planning stage, though.

But I bet it’ll break f••kity f••king IE for Windows.

Comments

Ahhhh....

[dbcooper.livejournal.com]

You too have discovered the joys of the phrase f**kity f**k. It has gotten me through many a frustrating night...but then, I once was cursed with a Toshiba notebook computer. ;)

For what it's worth, it's heartening to see a developer work with good browsers and then try to make the resulting solution work in IE.

[musewoozle.livejournal.com]

Admittedly, I'm not too familiar with working with web applications (though I'm moving in that direction, so I'm curious). Isn't it the case, though, that different browsers will just render pages in different ways?

Is IE just different in some odd ways?

-- Jacob

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

The problem (at least in this case) is that IE frequently renders things incorrectly when you're using complex style sheets. This is one of the main reasons that a lot of web sites don't *use* complex style sheets, even though doing so would substantially cut down the size and complexity -- and thus greatly help the maintainability -- of the corresponding HTML. IE gets fonts, colors, backgrounds, etc., right when they're in style sheets, but what it falls down on tends to relate to the "box model" -- essentially, every block on an HTML page, whether it's a paragraph or a list (or a list element) or, usually most importantly, a block the designer has organized with "div" tags, is a box, and CSS specifies standard ways to position them. To make a sidebar on the right side of the page, for instance, should be as simple as putting the sidebar in "div" tags and specifying the block you've created to be a certain width and to "float" to the right, just like an image tag that you've specified is right-aligned.

Alas, positioning is the part where IE most often trips over its shoelaces. What broke in my design from one day to the next was the navigation sidebar. In later iterations, IE decided that it would render the sidebar alone with blank space to its left, then render the content that was supposed to have been to its left in space underneath. I still can't actually figure out what I did that it didn't like, and other browsers seemed to be perfectly happy. The only solution I came up with was to make the page slightly more complex, and it took me a lot of head beating to figure that out.

Even after this, there are still things that IE gets wrong -- the buttons in the sidebar should be flush right with the edge of page header above it, for instance, and I still have no idea where IE is getting the idea that they're slightly indented. Again, every other browser gets it right. Fortunately, that's a minor defect rather than a big honking error.

[musewoozle.livejournal.com]

That is very intriguing.

Thank you for replying. :)

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

And just think, the new Service Pack came out for IE this morning, which will probably undo 99% of all the fixes you just made!

HOORJ!

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

No, it probably won't -- which in a bizarre way is the problem. Microsoft has fixed security bugs in IE, but they haven't fixed bugs in the rendering engine in it since IE 6.0's release in October 2001. And these are *bug fixes,* not feature upgrades. The last discernable upgrade to the rendering engine was 5.5b1 in December 1999.

[chastmastr.livejournal.com]

Oh, I loathe Internet Explorer. I prefer iCab. But various sites are set up only for IE... GRRRRR!

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

As both a wannabe engineer and a guy who likes Zen, I appreciate iCab. It does some cool things and it's very small and efficient. As a web designer, though, iCab is just slightly better than useless, and it's only going to get worse.

The problem is that the guy is obsessed with making The Perfectly Standards Compliant Browser [tm]. This is great in theory, except that (a) many pages aren't standards compliant and like it or not your browser has to deal with them rather than making a little pukey face, and (b) iCab's designer is apparently ignoring modern standards until he gets HTML 4 absolutely just so perfect. For the most part, he's perfectly spot on now, so in a sense iCab is 100% compliant with the state of the art -- in 1997.

Unfortunately, its CSS support approaches slightly worse then useless. You can see a technical list of its failures here (http://www.macedition.com/cb/resources/icab_notes.shtml#formstyling), but we'll just say that for all the attention its developer has lavished on basic HTML, he's been pretty woeful at lavishing attention on CSS -- iCab is, irony of ironies, only useful these days largely because web developers at big commercial sites are way behind on adapting the standards that iCab is behind at implementing. If you look at nearly any site I've done in the last few years, though, iCab gets it so wrong you'd be better off using Lynx. (Even LiveJournal is utterly broken in its display, lookiog at it just now.)

To be fair, it's arguable that developing a browser from scratch that really does what people expect in 2004 is simply not a one-person, or even two-person, job anymore. Some people swear by iCab, I know, but my experience with it has always led more to "at" than to "by." Supposedly iCab 3 will have full CSS 2 support and things will be much happier when it comes out, though. (At the current rate of development that should be Summer 2008.)