UPDATE 2: Would you believe I’m trying to fix all this while builders are fixing a broken pipe that’s flooded my flat?
UPDATE: PooterGeek now looks strange to all of you. I hope normal service will be resumed soon.
It has come to my attention that PooterGeek suddenly looks strange to those of you reading it through a Microsoft Internet Explorer window, rather than via a proper Web browser like Mozilla or Firefox. Specifically, the sidebar on the right, containing the search box, latest comment roll, and links, has slipped down to the bottom of the page. Even though it isn’t my fault, I’d like to apologise—not only for that, but for the traumatic upgrade process that we are all going to have to live through over the next couple of days to fix it. Do not fear, my people, but do brace yourself for some strange effects.
Over the weekend I spent a lot of time wrestling with the design of another Website I am working on. Apart from the boring geek work, darlings, I had to make aesthetic compromises. Why? Because Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) fails to operate according to published and agreed Web standards. We don’t have any choice because Microsoft does its best to keep PC-users lazy and ignorant. The company does it so effectively that customers often don’t even realise they did have a choice. Worse, many Webmasters (not always by their own choice) force their visitors to use IE. For all these reasons Explorer is the most popular Web browser, despite being one of the most insecure, and everyone in the business has to make allowances for it. I hate it.
[“Bum-head”, incidentally, was kindly donated to me by a friend and I am using it as my word-of-the-day. Please feel free to deploy it yourself at work today: while cross-examining a witness in court, at a board meeting, or following a crucial question on a ward round.]
What really annoys me about it is that I actually rather like IE, from a user’s point of view. Firefox is far, far better, yes, but it’s the first browser to be so, in my opinion — I could never understand people who insisted on using the merely quite good Mozilla or the truly awful Opera while slagging off a browser that was about as good as the former and a gazoolion times better than the latter. And then, after a few hours of coding (a few more hours than necessary, naturally), I find myself wishing death on the entire MicroSoft team, bastards that they are.
Incidentally, by far the best solution I’ve found to the box-model problem is to create separate elements for padding, thus:
#box { margin: 20px; height: 400px; etc, etc;}
#box .padding { padding: 10px;}
<div id=”box”><div class=”padding”>
Unlike the Tantek hack and its ilk, this one actually uses correct code to get round the bug, making it completely future-proof. Yay!
If you already knew that one, my apologies for appearing condescending.
Not condescending at all. Thanks for the tip.
[…] George Szirtes complained recently of PooterGeek looking even weirder than usual on his old Mac. This was fixed by installing the free version of this Web browser. It also improved his experience of various other sites compared with the way they looked under Internet Explorer—not surprising given that IE is software written by bum-heads. […]