Reproach of Men

Ahhh, Internet Explorer 6. The web browser that is not a browser.

After having worked on the design of this blog, and getting it correct in IE6, I (wrongfully) assumed that the alignment and fit of the content and sidebar would stay correct. I finished working the last few things and checked it with Firefox and let it go.

Mistake.

I checked it in IE6 and somehow, the sidebar was shoved too far left and floating below the content, despite being instructed to float right.

Grrrrr.

The problem is that IE6 contains a quirk (one of IE6’s many bugs) that doubles the margins and padding if both left and right margins/padding are set. So, what should have been 15 pixels on the right side, was now 30 pixels spacing.

Nice. I really appreciate the folks at Microsoft for this bug that should have been caught in testing, or should have had a bug fix issued on it when it was brought to their attention.

Amazing. Microsoft wants to dominate the Internet, and can’t program a piece of software that renders a page correctly, and won’t issue a fix, and won’t retract the bad program. No, their solution is to issue IE7 (which also has page rendering problems) and complain that everyone else is not right.

Typical spoiled brat behavior.

Anyway, I fixed the problem, and now it actually does look good in IE6.

After some time of neglect (I really cannot put it any other way) I returned my attention to my website — Reproach of Men and began to deal with some of the issues created by the browser wars (primarily IE6 and below). I finally gave up on trying to have a decent fluid layout for IE6 and below and set everything for IE (up to version 6), to a fixed-width of 800 pixels. I hate that as I like liquid and elastic layouts¹. However, I cannot tolerate the quirks and weirdness of IE6, and so I am forced to do something I don’t like.

For the rest of the standards-compliant browsers out there², the layout remains liquid from 400 to 1200 pixels (there is a limit you know). After that the page is a column in the middle of the screen with a black background. I know, kinda stark, but it draws your attention to the content, and only the content.

I am also in the middle of revising the coding for all the hymns pages, which ought to be done in the near future. Then, LORD willing, I will rework and actually properly format the rest of the articles on the site. I really do not want to do content management for the site, but may be forced into it if things ramp up considerably.

However, before I quit this post, I would like to say one last time how very much I hate IE. In fact, I really don’t care for Microsoft either. Particularly since Bill Gates is such a liberal and donates a considerable sum to causes that are destroying America and its people. Unfortunately, time is the most precious commodity I have, and it takes time to learn a new OS like Ubuntu Linux. For now, I am kind of stuck – just like having to code for IE.

That’s really not moving forward is it?

1. Yes I know, this theme is fixed-width — I didn’t catch that when I first looked at it. However, I like the theme, but cannot find the author to talk about changing it — so I am in the process of making it liquid.↩
2. if you don’t have one, please get one — they’re usually free to download and use — besides, your web experience will be so much better↩

Microsoft never ceases to amaze me. Since I build websites (my own and a few others), it is important to me that the site look the same in every browser (well, at least all the major ones). Thus, the fact that IE6 requires its own styles is a pain that I (and every other website developer) could do without. So, when I read that IE7 was “standards compliant” I thought that I could use the same styles that I use for Opera, Firefox and Safari. Silly, naive me. I didn’t research it out enough and simply took the word of some Microsoft apologists (had I known they were apologists for Microsoft I would have never listened), and thought I was done last Friday evening with recoding the mainpages of the site.

Today, I was informed that the pages didn’t float right in IE7 – not good. Thus, enduring the lengthy dial-up download of IE7, I (under duress – but I have to check the pages) then installed it on my wife’s computer. Sure enough – none of the floats were correct. In fact, it had the exact same problems as IE6, just in different directions. Joy. Now I had to have a second IE stylesheet to fix the problems of IE7, and I had to hack a fix for the articles section on every page that has articles.

However, it is done, and all without anesthetic (it would have felt better if I had had a tooth pulled). It does display (mostly) correctly, but I hated having to do it. Once again, Microsoft has proved that they don’t know what their doing.

Have I mentioned that I hate Microsoft products?