The ever-vigilant web stylist, Ms. Gepner, sent me a screenshot of the bad news that I knew was coming but was living in denial of. Yes, the newly released beta versions of Microsoft’s sucky browser did indeed break my website.
The upcoming style problems with Internet Explorer 7 (the latest aberration in standards compliant web browsing) have been foretold by design gurus for months. The development community has been lamenting the fact that Micro$oft saw fit to only fix a puny smattering of IE6’s bugs (of which there are MANY)… yet at the same time they removed a small “hack”, better known as the Holly Hack, which will now hearby eliminate the primary trick that web designers have been using to work around all of the IE bugs that have plagued it for as long as anyone can remember.
Now web designers have a terrible situation. All their Holly Hacks they’ve been using to beat IE versions 6 and below into submission are now gone… thank you Bill “Enemy At The” Gates. Yet, most of the bugs that we were using those hacks to fix are STILL IN THE BROWSER! You can’t make this stuff up. So now we have to use conditional logic in our webpages to load multiple CSS files… a primary CSS file and then an additional one to handle IE6 and below… and probably a third one to handle IE7. Fortunately, I was able to handle IE7 with one extra line of style so I wrote it in without another CSS file.
Here’s what the circus that was my compliant code looks like now:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" />
<!--[if lte IE 6]>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”style.css.ie6″ type=”text/css” />
<![endif]–>
<!–[if gt IE 6]>
<style>
#subcontent {float: right; position:absolute; margin-left: -175px; width:175px;}
</style>
<![endif]–>
Ugly. Very ugly. I hate Internet Explorer. For the love all that is decent and pure and right in this world… please, download and use a compliant web browser.
Web designer and developer. Loud discerner. Software engineer and 
Do you have an example of the older, broken (in IE7) design? It would be useful for figuring out what combination of factors caused the problem you had to work around. If not, can you describe what bits of CSS caused the problem? Not just the Holly hack, but the bug around which it was working in IE6.
I like your sublimal message in your post: Micro$oft
I use Internet Explorer at my job because that is all they allow. They also still use Windows 2000 sp 4 with the 2000 server, but that is another story… But I have become accustomed (addicted? Tricked?) to IE. I have Firefox and I have used it frequently, though. Which to Use? As an Italian actor once said, “Sometimes you want fish, sometimes you want chicken, but you can’t have chicken every night!”
Of course, I don’t design web sites all that often, so the problems with Billy and his gang’s browser probably escapes me.
First it was Mac versus PC. Now Firefox versus IE…Let the battling posts begin
Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce Eric Meyer… an internationally recognized expert on HTML and Cascading Style Sheets… AND author of several books that are considered to be the authoritative volumes on CSS design.
When he asks for collaboration on web design, you just say yes.
Eric, I’ll strip out the broken CSS file of bulk and send it to you. My original style used positive padding on my outside container div and negative margins on my inner divs to trick IE6 into a minimum width of 800px. I wanted a fluid center column between two fixed width columns so this seemed the best way. For a reason that I haven’t solved, yet, IE7 did not appreciate the negative margins on the right hand fixed width column.
Again, I’ll email you, send you the style, and talk over the issues. I am pleasantly surprised to work with you on this CSS debugging.
Tony :: I, too, seem to be tricked into using IE, although FireFox is what i use for many other purposes because of the tabs. But for whatever reason my RPI alumni email doesn’t work correctly in FireFox so I use IE exclusively for that and a few other things. It’s a confusing world out there.
05 16 06
Hey there Steve:
Sorry you have been having these problems. I cannot stand IE!!! I use Firefox almost exclusively. EXCEPT when some jerk designed their software to run only on IE (e.g. my school registration software). Argh! If everyone focused on building software to work ACROSS browsers and platforms we would be better off. MS seems to be a cult with followers that pay lots of money because they are either lazy or ignorant or just don’t have the time to build their own little BSD boxes. My husband is obsessed with little BSD boxes:) Have a great rest of week.
Actually, while I certainly appreciate your offer, it’s probably better to NOT boil down the CSS. If you want to comment the lines directly relevant to the issue, cool– but I sometimes find that problems lie far afield, in bits of the CSS that one would never expect to cause a problem. If nothing else, the rest of the CSS helps give context to the stuff that’s causing the problem. Hopefully I’ll be able to help you avoid the conditional comment morass!
I must admit, I use Firefox at home and I LOVE it. It really sucks that I don’t have the Administrator access to install anything on the computers at work.
mahndisa :: Holy smokes, yes… those web applications that are made such that they ONLY work in IE… that’s the pinnacle of web negligence!
Eric :: Understood. Yeah, sometimes it’s the little things that are the easiest to overlook. I’ll send you complete files.
Montane :: At work I don’t have admin rights to my PC either. Can you believe it? I’m in a whole friggin’ department of IT people… software engineers and applications programmers… and none of can install software on our own PCs apart form some automated service we run that only has software that has gone through an obscene gauntlet of security checks. And needless to say, software that is open source and free is HIGHLY looked down upon for being open source and free and therefore dangerous. (whatever)
Somehow I see a Kansas joke in the title. That’s just an odd coincidence right?
Ha! It took me a triple and quadruple take to figure out what you were talking about… until I saw the title. That was wholly unintentional, but now that you point it out i like it!
btw, this Mexican keyboard has a different layout and is really screwing me up. I guess thta´s the price of being in Cancun. *sigh*
I HATE INTERNET EXPLORER 7 BETA 2 VERSION SUCKS CRAP.NOTHING BUT PROBLEMS ON MY COMPUTER,IT WONT LET ME DO ANYTHING,AND THE WORST IS,IT WONT LET ME UN INSTALL IT,ITS CRAP CRAP CRAP,DONT GIEV IT A TRY,ITS BEEN ON MY NERVES SINCE I HAVE PUT IT ON MY COMPUTER ,AND I CANT GO TO CHAT ROOMS ANYMORE,THE ONES I USED TO GO TO,ITS BULL CRAP,ERRORS ON HOME PAGE ALWAYS FOUND.SO DONT WASTE YOUR TIME.
ill name 1 person that uses internet explorer, my grandparents.
i feel the pain, my site too was ruinedby internet explorer, random crap.com. I just (sniff) cant stand it, ise gets choked up every time!
One Trackback
[...] hate internet explorer, I hate it so much. At lest once a day I curse it to the pits of hell to be torched endlessly by a [...]