May 20, 2003
Internet Explorer Blues
OK, the site now looks fine in Mozilla and Opera. It also looks fine in Internet Explorer. Exactly how I wanted it. As long as your font size is set to "medium". Mozilla and Opera have no problems with changing the font size; Opera has a nifty trick of scaling everything and works no matter what; Mozilla works perfectly at three sizes and reasonably well until you start getting into the absurdly large; Explorer - resize and bleah. Well, I'll probably do a "plain jane" stylesheet for people with odd browsers, or those who need font sizes cranked up real large. Hmm hmm hmm. I could make things scale a little better if I made the sidebars wider. Hmm hmm.
I'm Not A Web Designer...
But I do play one in real life.
While my database is rebuilding I thought I'd try out a Javascript-based trick for browser-selective stylesheets. Works. Ha ha! Of course, I still can't get IE to display things properly, but at least now I can decide exactly how I want it to be broken.
Mojira!
Mozilla users can preview the new Ambient Irony here. IE users can wail and gnash their teeth. If you don't have any teeth, they will be provided.
(If you're reading this then you've obviously made it to the right place. Leave a comment. Let me know what you think.)
Grr! Grr, I Say!
Oh, that's charming. Blogger ate my rant. Grrr!
And Moveable Type, while stable and elegant, is as slow as a wet week. Grrr! Grrr!!
Random Acts Of Browser Suckage
There's no question any more: Mozilla is by far a better browser than Internet Explorer. Just two features are enough to blow IE out of the water: popup blocking - I never see a popup - and tabbed browsing. I often have a dozen tabs open. One window, twelve web pages. No clutter, fast, simple. Right-click a link and it opens in another tab while you keep reading the page you're on.
But there's a third and even bigger reason: IE's CSS (cascading stylesheet) support sucks. That's the mildest word I can think of to describe it. What can you say for a browser that implements the right-hand margin backwards, so that your page is guaranteed to extend beyond the width of your window? Or how about a browser that, when you overlay one section of the page on another, makes all your images disappear?
I have a beautiful layout for my new Moveable Type blog, simple and elegant, and IE fucks it up beyond redemption. I could mess around and generate alternate stylesheets for Mozilla/Opera vs. IE, but the whole goddamn point of stylesheets is that you're not supposed to have to do that.