Phill Sacre

Internet Explorer, Internet Connectivity and, um, 666 posts…

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Phill Sacre
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Hmmm, before I made this post, there were 666 posts in total on this blog! Having said that, apparently the “mark of the beast” is actually meant to be something like 626, they added it up wrong. Or, um, something. I don’t know!

Anyway. Yesterday evening was rather annoying – our internet at home was down! This was annoying because I was trying to come up with a new website design for this blog. Which brings me neatly on to the subject of Internet Explorer.

Is anyone else fed up with Internet Explorer, and its lack of CSS support? The web is ready to move on – it’s embracing cool new changes like CSS and XHTML. Things are rapidly changing, a few years ago it was acceptable to have a non-compliant website with table layouts etc. A lot of websites still do (because for a business, these things are often embedded and difficult to change, and there are probably still some layouts which it’s best to use tables for). But today, more and more websites are starting to write W3C standard code (I believe it’s become mandatory for government websites), Accessibility is an issue (check out the WAI homepage), and in general web designers are realising the power that pure-CSS designs can have.

And here, we have poor old Internet Explorer, stuck in the past, still not properly supporting CSS attributes such as “float”… unfortunately, it’s what 80% of internet users use, so you’re forced to make your site look good in IE (well, not really, the current design for phillsacre.me.uk doesn’t actually display properly in IE but that’s just because I can’t be bothered to hack a perfectly good website so it will display properly in a stupid browser). I am absolutely fed up of having to be careful with what CSS I’m going to use because it won’t display properly in Internet Explorer.

Come on, all those of you stuck in the past – use a decent browser such as Mozilla Firefox! Standards are the way forward and Microsoft have got to learn that if they don’t want to play nicely, they’re going to suffer….

Comments

7 responses to “Internet Explorer, Internet Connectivity and, um, 666 posts…”

  1. Matthew avatar
    Matthew

    I agree, IE is a pile of soggy pants. Firefox is good, and Safari is faster than both (there a few limitations I’ve come across so far, but they tend to be the sort of problems caused by web sites being designed exclusively for IE).

    Incidentally, my internet wasn’t working last night either. Curious. What ISP are you using? I wonder if it was something to do with a particular ISP, or a certain section of the phone lines or something…

    And what’s wrong with tables, might I ask? I’ve been using them a lot recently, though I have been getting rather annoyed with trying to get everything in the right place. I’m redesigning my own blog at the mo, and so far I’ve been using tables to achieve this. If there is a better way, do let me know…

    Reply
  2. Simon avatar
    Simon

    I like Opera. It’s small and fast, and doesn’t struggle over some webpages (like your site, Phill!) as much as Firefox!

    Reply
  3. Phill avatar
    Phill

    Matthew, here we use internet provided by one of Paul’s friends. The reason it went down on Thurdsay night was because they changed the usernames without telling us! It’s all working OK now.

    The reason you shouldn’t use tables is because they are sooo nineties dah-ling…! But seriously, according to the WAI guidelines (which I mentioned) you should only use tables for, well, tabular information. Layout tables confuse screen readers. Also, tables are very much tied down to one particular layout. The days are gone when you had to have a page with its design embedded in it, CSS is much faster and cleaner. If you want to change the design of your site down the road, chances are you’ll have to do messing around with the tables – in CSS, if you design the page right all you need to do is change the style sheet. For more information see the CSS Zen Garden.

    Re: browsers – I don’t care what you use as long as it supports W3C standards! Maybe IE7 will bring that, although I suspect it will be too little too late. I use Mozilla Firefox because it’s open source, and to my knowledge Opera and Safari are proprietary pieces of software. I believe strongly in the principles of the open-source movement which is why I use Firefox, but in terms of what we’ve been discussing and what I mentioned in my initial blog post, anything other than Internet Explorer will do 😉

    Reply
  4. Alex avatar
    Alex

    woah! Lots of catching up for me here. As far as I know 666 is the number of the beast for the following reason. God is representated by the number 3 (the trinity), man is hte number 6 (can’t remember why). 666 is basically man trying to be God. Which isn’t good.

    Hope that helps clear up

    could be completly wrong too – but a very good person at theology told me that!

    Alex

    Reply
  5. Phill avatar
    Phill

    Hmm, you might be write Alex. I was under the impression, though, that it was a number game with letters, i.e. if you assign each letter in the alphabet a number and then add up the numbers in a certain word, you got 666. I’m not sure how it was worked out, though!

    Reply
  6. Zeth avatar
    Zeth

    “The reason you shouldn’t use tables is because they are sooo nineties dah-ling…! But seriously, according to the WAI guidelines (which I mentioned) you should only use tables for, well, tabular information.”

    Thats all very well in theory, but in practice DIVs are not fully supported in IE. Not to mention that if you inherit an old site then it is full of tables…

    IE support, for paid work I still do it, but for my amateur sites I gave up on that one a while ago. Also the 80% who use IE are less likely to go to my sites probably.

    Just let it look crap I say. Then when the user grows up to a real browser it will look right then.

    ” knowledge Opera and Safari are proprietary pieces of software”

    Well Opera is moving in the right direction, and Safari is a castrated version of Konqueror (Konqueror can be very very fast in KDE – but I use Gnome usually) i.e. the tabs and everything have been removed.

    The reason Firefox rules is the extension system, I have dozens installed and I could not live without them.

    Reply
  7. Phill avatar
    Phill

    I know what you mean about extensions, Zeth – the Web Developer extension is about the most useful thing for a web developer ever. Editing stylesheets on the fly… amazing.

    I agree with you about letting sites just look crap in IE – I think I managed to find quite a good compromise with this one though, I’ve checked in Firefox and IE and it looks OK in both.

    Reply

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