I’ve just spent a few long hours playing with things. I’ve now got a nice page up explaining why XHTML is bad news, in case anyone happens to browse through my markup and don’t know what they’re doing. I’m happy with the way it turned out, so go read it if you’re even slightly interested in how XHTML works.
In other news I spent all of yesterday night messing around with CSS, and ended up with a beautiful piece of CSS artwork the Internet Explorer defiled. I say that because I went and rewrote the main style of this web site with the right dimensions in mind. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it, but Internet Explorer makes a complete mess of the box model and so naturally my meticulously calculated point, pixel and percentage values were more than IE could handle. I took the liberty of taking a few screen shots which you can use to compare the standard render and Internet Explorer’s render. There’s not much to compare, let me tell you. I was shocked at just how messed up it ended up being — especially when it rendered perfectly in Konqueror, Opera and Firefox (Quite an achievement for me, Konqueror doesn’t like me much.)
Any way, after a bit of fuming and plotting I still haven’t come to a conclusion as to what I’m going to do with IE. I considered just making sure that IE 6 and under didn’t @import any stylesheets, then I started working on an IE specific style sheet… Neither of those are overly graceful, and I’m loathe to use cheap hacks when I haven’t had to before.
Nevertheless I’m sure I’ll come up with something. I was kind of hoping to roll out the next phase of this site design sometime soon, but it’ll have to wait until I’ve ironed out everything alas. It’s 8 o’clock in the morning — I think I need a McMuffin
Responses
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4 Comments
Forget IE. I wouldn’t bother racking my brain and exhausting my efforts to make something work for IE, even if it is still the most commonly used browser. Mind you my target audience is probably not that average windows user…
*shrugs* klepas
I vote for IE Specific style sheets, c’mon there is NOTHING wrong with them. It’s not our fault IE sucks.
Eventually I’ll have a fall back stylesheet that makes things nicer for browsers with IE-level compatability. See, that sounds nicer than "An IE Stylesheet," because it’s not IE specific. I’m considering using:
as a method to let IE skip the bits it doesn’t like. I’m just a little against using deliberately IE-specific hacky hacks.
Power to <!—[if IE]>!
Hmm,
You can use multiple tags for one CSS style, which firefox will ignore while causing IE to display things correctly.
Nonetheless, IE is the majority power on what works or not, so don’t give up on IE.
Thanks for your feedback.