OK, so it looks like I’ve wandered into a minefield with my new design. Y’know, the one that doesn’t work in Internet Explorer 6 or less. Which is the browser the vast majority of the public is still using stuck with.
Funny, I didn’t notice that during the design phase. I thought about booting my new sexy thing into XP last weekend to check it out, but it’s such a hassle to reboot and I didn’t think it mattered. Also, I didn’t want to be stuck in XP forever.
At any rate, I’m doing a lot of research on the topic, and as it turns out, there are a lot of workarounds and bug-exploits that will trick Internet Explorer (versions 6 or less) into rendering CSS2 elements the way every other browser does. It’s like a riddle: when is “the standard” not standards-compliant?
So I’m learning about the CSS box model, and the star HTML bug and the underscore hack, and conditional stylesheets and all sorts of other stuff.
And learning is fun.
It’s just not so fun when I’m doing it to support something that’s both widely-used and brain-damaged.
At any rate, don’t give up hope, IE >=6 users! First, as noted you could upgrade your browser to something more 21st Century:
If you can’t switch from IE, you could try Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2, just released this week. I haven’t installed that, because I still need a version of IE 6 to test my fix, but I’ve heard it’s more *ahem* standards-compliant.
If you can’t upgrade your browser at all (shame on you, surfing from work with such restrictive IT folk! You’re going to get fired doing that!)… well, you can try to not load the CSS at all. I’m not sure how to do that, but that sounds like a great feature to add to my site, huh? I’ve seen it on other sites so I know it’s possible, though.
Still, hold on, I’m working on it. I do want people to be able to read my site. I swear. It’s not just for me and my closest friends. Honest.
I mean, c’mon. I’m a blogger, for crying out crab! I want attention!