Style Sheets and Internet Explorer
Style sheets are a wonderful thing for creating complex web pages. If you use style sheets correctly, you can easily change your entire look and feel for many web pages by making a few simple changes in a common style sheet.
Too bad Internet Explorer doesn’t conform to the standards as specificed by World Wide Web Consortium. All too often, IE does not support the standards, or implements a feature in a Microsoft proprietary way, which results in web pages that only format properly in Microsoft’s browser.
When I design web pages, I can usually put together something with the basic layout I wish in a few minutes if I use a standards complient browser such as Mozilla. Then I spend a several hours getting the layout to look reasonable when viewed with IE.
I could simply ignore the standards and stick with pure IE specific features. After all, Microsoft enjoys monopoly control of the browser world. I won’t do that, however, because I refuse to let Microsoft’s monopoly control me. I don’t use IE for browsing. I use Firebird, a Mozilla based browser that follows the standards. Besides, if I use Microsoft’s definition of the standards, only people running Windows would be able to view my web pages correctly.
Because of my stubborness, I design web pages to look their best using a standards complient browser and look o.k. in Internet Explorer. To see an example of this, take a look at my history page, Ye Olde Book O’ Seadogs. When using a good browser, the menu on the left remains fixed when you scroll the page. Under IE, the menu scrolls along with the rest of the page. To get IE working even this well required a bit of trickery.
I defined the <DIV> to work with IE using this definition:
#menu {
position: absolute;
top: 2px;
left: 2px;
text-align: center;
width:150px;
background: black;
height: 100%;
font-size: 12pt;
}
Then I added an override that IE did not undestand, so ignored:
body > #menu {
position: fixed;
}
This trick may seem simple enough, but it took me hours of research to discover it. Now multiple those hours by the dozens (or hundreds) of simple fixes that need to be researched. A thirty minute layout design ends up taking days of research. Life would be so much simplier if Microsoft would just stick to the damn standard!
For a more extreme examples, take a look at css/edge. This excellent website has numerous examples of slick things you can do with standards complient css (cascading style sheets), most of which fail miserably under Internet Explorer. I especially like the nested popup menus.
January 7th, 2004 at 1:16 pm
Internet Explorer is light years beyond Mozilla as far as robustness and reliability are concerned. Far more is possible with Internet Explorer. This is why every large scale web development project i’ve worked on has targeted IE first as the platform. Then, we painstakingly go and fix all the things that mozilla can’t handle (usually we have to remove functionality that we otherwise can have in IE). I’ve never had something work correctly with Mozilla and not in IE. I’m not sure what planet you live on, but just accept the fact which is that IE is a pleasure to develop for, and if you don’t know that, then you don’t know how to develop in a Microsoft environment. I’ve developed for both Mozilla and IE, and I am here to tell you that IE is God’s gift to web developers — Mozilla is a monstrosity sent from the depths of hell (I know this from many many years of large scale web development projects.)
January 13th, 2004 at 9:31 am
What planet are YOU from Jonny? I’m not ganna turn this into a flame war, but Internet exploder is one of the worst browers out there. It’s got tons of security holes, it crashes all the time, it’s easily the gateway to some of the worst spyware on the planet and Mozilla can do basically everything IE can just as easily and most of the time better or faster. Just because it might take a little more effort to install a plug-in, and just because Mozilla isn’t fully supported by newbies scripters and web designers who never heard of it, does not make it a bad broswer. It’s one of the best browers out there, hands down, period. If you’re having problems getting Mozilla to work right with your websites, you need a lesson in web design. Because every single site I’ve ever designed for nearly 6 years have all worked fine in every single browser I owned. (Including Mozilla since the project started)
Now go back to your hole and come back to this site when you have a lick of experience in web development. Then we might respect your comments a bit more.
PS: did you ever read the article?
September 14th, 2004 at 4:06 pm
IE god’s gift to web developers?!? I beg to differ, have you ever attempted to debug a javascript in Internet Explorer, it’s like trying to remover your own tooth with a pair of pliers. On the other hand Mozilla has a nice javascript debugger. Layout and css actually work correctly with Mozilla and as for stability I havn’t had Mozilla (or Firebird for that matter) crash in a very long time.
Anybody who targets a website for any single browser is not a web developer. Sure doesn’t have support for Active X but then again only windows users have that support.
If a page doesn’t pass the w3c validator test it shouldn’t be on the internet. Period.
January 13th, 2004 at 9:20 am
I see the Microsoft drones haven’t changed one little bit. They somehow think that because something works in IE but not in other browsers that it is because IE is doing it the correct way and the other browsers are broke. I have some news for you, sparky, the IE extensions you are so in love with are not part of the web standard as set by w3c. Those features don’t work with Mozilla because w3c did not accept them as part of the standard. Mircosoft does NOT define the web standards, though they are doing their best to subvert it.
The standard exists for a reason. The world isn’t just Microsoft Windows. Other operating systems exist, such as Apple’s OS/X, Linux, Unix, and so on. That functionality you must remove from your web design isn’t available on other platforms. Stuff like ActiveX, which should more properly be called ActiveVirusInfection.
If you use Internet Explorer to browse the web, odds are your system has become infected with all kinds of “fun” things such as Gator. That viral piece of shit is responsible for nasties such as porn popups. Ever had your home page setting hijacked? You can thank Internet Explorer’s lack of security for that. How many parents have discovered their child’s home page was set to a hardcore porn page? Too many. Thank you Microsoft.
Since you admit you design your web pages for Internet Explorer you also admit you know nothing about web standards and don’t care about security issues.
BTW, designing an entire web site using Flash is not something to be proud of.