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.