I first tried moving to a CSS-based layout a couple of years ago to shed my use of multiply-nested tables used for positioning. While I was ripping everything apart, I added some fancier stuff. The site looked great in Firefox, Safari and even Opera. My enthusiasm was folded, spindled and mutilated when I previewed the site in Internet Explorer.
IE implements CSS very half-assedly, partly because the standards were incomplete when IE was launched, but mostly because there's little incentive to keep innovating a product that's "given away" yet has a commanding market share. Google offered dozens of workarounds for some of the problems. Each involved using arcane CSS options, JavaScript chicanery or maintenance of multiple style sheets. Conclusion? It's too much work and I don't do web design for a living. I abandoned some of the more interesting ideas and considered myself fortunate enough to get rid of nested tablery.
I was curious how much the user population has changed. Last July, 74% of visitors to my site used IE variants (or browsers pretending they were IE), compared to 5% FireFox. This month, it's about 61%/20%. Of the IE users, almost a fourth are still using pre-Windows XP systems. They will not be upgrading to Internet Explorer 7 whenever it's released.
I'm not really sure how much I should be concerned about this least-common denominator. I'd be tempted to just abandon trying, but I'm reminded how much I hated seeing Factiva.com tell me I couldn't use Firefox because its programmers coded to IE quirks.
IE implements CSS very half-assedly, partly because the standards were incomplete when IE was launched, but mostly because there's little incentive to keep innovating a product that's "given away" yet has a commanding market share. Google offered dozens of workarounds for some of the problems. Each involved using arcane CSS options, JavaScript chicanery or maintenance of multiple style sheets. Conclusion? It's too much work and I don't do web design for a living. I abandoned some of the more interesting ideas and considered myself fortunate enough to get rid of nested tablery.
I was curious how much the user population has changed. Last July, 74% of visitors to my site used IE variants (or browsers pretending they were IE), compared to 5% FireFox. This month, it's about 61%/20%. Of the IE users, almost a fourth are still using pre-Windows XP systems. They will not be upgrading to Internet Explorer 7 whenever it's released.
I'm not really sure how much I should be concerned about this least-common denominator. I'd be tempted to just abandon trying, but I'm reminded how much I hated seeing Factiva.com tell me I couldn't use Firefox because its programmers coded to IE quirks.
.