Why didn't someone tell me my blog looked so bad?
I keep forgetting that sometimes I need to take a step back and look at things from another prespective. In this case Opera and IE. Wow. I knew the old blog was looking frayed around the edges in Firefox, in the other two browsers I tried it looks downright decayed.
I think its time to go find some new templates. I think I'll try to find something ad friendly, perhaps in three colums. Ads on the left, content in the middle, navigation on the right.
Oh yeah, I have everything else to do also....this could be a while.
Patience friends.
Comments
What a coincidence that you bring this up...
I had been debating about switching my MySpace profile over to a Div Overlay format (where basically you use an HTML section called a Div to hide the standard MySpace format and then design whatever you want to on top of the Div).
Well, when my MySpace profile actually got hacked, that made up my mind that I wanted to do the overlay method.
I've been working on my new profile under a different account name for a few weeks now, and after many hours, I got it looking perfect in Safari, Firefox, and Opera (with only one positioning problem remaining in Opera).
Then, I looked at it in Win IE at Dave's house, and the whole thing looks like crap. Two side-by-side columns are not side-by-side, one subsection is wider than it should be, another section is narrower than it should be, two of my underlined headers have "underlines" that are screen-tall rectangles, the hover function doesn't work, centered items aren't centered, the div that is supposed to cover the old MySpace format doesn't cover it up, etc. Ever since then, I've had to research how to "hack" IE to make stuff look right, and I still can't get a single thing fixed yet.
It turns out IE handles CSS differently than every other browser out there, and it drives web designers crazy. Instead of sticking to CSS2 standards, Microsoft (don't get me started on the M word) decided to have propietary HTML & CSS functioning because they have to be different from everyone else. (When they're not copying stuff from Apple, I guess they take individualism too far the other direction--oops, I got started on the M word.)
Designers have to devote hours of trial-by-error toward messy code to get their sites to look good on all browsers. I've even read that it costs companies several thousand dollars in extra time, resources, and maintenance to make things work on IE and that the IE bugs are the main things delaying the CSS3 model (whatever that is; I'm not an expert on this stuff yet).
The next problem is that the new IE7 won't allow the hacks that people use for IE5/IE6/MacIE, and yet, IE7 doesn't seem to fix all the problems for which the hacks were working around. Now, what will designers have to do???
The most referenced site out there for CSS knowledge and how to handle browser bugs (especially the plethora of IE5/IE6/MacIE bugs) is:
www.positioniseverything.com
Whew. Sorry, Woody, you picked a topic that hit close to home. ;) Good luck with the re-design.
Posted by: Todd W in NC | November 27, 2006 12:39 PM