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

[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. :)