July 20, 2003

CSS and IE: A Deadly Combo

I have been working on redesigning my entire site using only CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and XHTML. This means my new site doesn't use tables for layout, which makes it more accessible for different sorts of browsers. The only problem? Microsoft, as usual!

I knew when I started with the CSS redesign that IE had supposed CSS bugs, but I ignored it, thinking that they must be obscure and small, because how could a large-scale browser that more than half of the Internet viewing public uses have major problems? Apparently, very easily. I started redesigning my site at the end of May, and worked on it slowly during June and July, while doing CalSO. About ready to go last week, I decided to check how it looked in other browsers, besides Mozilla, because that's the browser I use at home. It looked fine in Opera and some other browsers I checked, but when I opened up my blog in IE 6x, it blew up. The text was going every which way, the borders were getting blurred out, and there were huge gaps in the middle of the screen.

I was dumbfounded. This very CSS and XHTML, which had even validated, was not showing up right at all in IE. What the hell? How could Microsoft's bugs be so great, even when they are all basing it on the same goddamn standard! However much I messed with it, I couldn't get it to show up right, and tired and frustrated, I gave up. Today, I was messing with it again, and finally think I have found a solution, but it's a compromise, at best.

This really blows because if it had been some small-scale random browser, I would probably have ignored the error, and just put a small warning on my page, because I've already wasted enough time with this crap. But when things aren't working in Internet Explorer, you can't just give it up, because everyone uses IE! I wish people would see the light about how shitty that browser is and just get a better one, but people are stupid! And as long as people are stupid, and Microsoft continues to make shitty products, I have to waste hours upon hours hacking on stuff that is supposed to work and does work! Damn it all!