After playing around for most of the last two days, I’ve got a new appreciation for just how horribly broken Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is. I’ve been trying to get a page to work the way I expect it to using cascading style sheets, and I’ve got it down to a good, consistent layout. It’s nothing too complex: just a title banner across the top of the page, a block of text beneath that, and a navitaion bar down the right side of the screen.
It works beautifully in Safari and the Mozilla group of browsers (including FireFox and Camino). It’s pretty good in OmniPage and even though it’s not as pretty, it’s still useable in iCab. But if you open the page with Opera or Explorer it turns to crap. For Explorer to show anything, I have to deliberately do things that screw up the way things display on the other browsers.
Unfortunately, according to the logs, a good 70% of the people looking at this server are using some form of Explorer. And because of Explorer, anything we design is going to need some heinous hacks to make it look remotely good. Yesterday, CSS was something new and exciting, with lots of promise. Today it’s a new nightmare where I can’t be sure that my new designs won’t look like crap on a client’s machine. I feel like I’ve just been told that I need to play the piano in a recital, but before I can start I have roll some dice, and if I lose I’ll be forced to put on a pair of oven mitts.
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