Working with CSS and the trials of the "Window's Browser"

By now most of us know the wonders of CSS and layers. Well at least if you are a web designer using a mentality past 1998. Long gone are tables, 1px image hack and nesting of tables and tables. Embrace the power of CSS. As useful as CSS has proved to be, is not as compatible sometimes with a certain browser which I won't name. That browser comes built-in into windows, it has been in version 6 for ages, spyware friendly, tab coming in Vista, and RSS support, you only should use it if you don't know anything about Computing, yea that one.

Thanks to great "exploration of the internet" this browser provides hacks must be made to CSS code in order to make it work. Pain in the neck? Yes. Can you forget about it and code your CSS tailor to everybody else? Maybe.

You see if you don't tailor to the crappy rendering engine that IE has (I wasn't going to name it ..oh well) you are doing the same thing many websites do to us Safari, Firefox users. Many times we have stumble upon websites that refuse to work at all under Safari/Firefox.

Why because many web designers still believe the internet is run on Internet Explorer. This is not only an issue to banks, online bidding sites, and more. It also affects Microsoft's own web site. As to say: "You outsiders we don't want you here!". Although it has gotten better lately, many of the other sites under the Microsoft umbrella fail to be compliant to the standard. Not their IE standard, but the industry standard. See MCP Member site if you need proof. Non-working menus abound.

Although CSS doesn't hamper usability to certain extend as much as hacked IE oriented code does, it still important to give the best experience to everyone. To the ignorant masses still out there, as well as the ones that chose the better alternative.

In short working with CSS, as good and delightful as it may be it is still a pain. Sure its better and its the future along with the whole slew of Web 2.0 stuff (AJAX, Ruby on Rails etc). The fact that you need to nail the same look on every freaking browser platform, through hacking trial-and-error sometimes pisses me off.

Maybe I'm not a very patience filled web designer (or a web designer by that matter..but shhhh ;) )

End of tuesday, into wednesday and PvD plays on..