[m a d r a]

i've been working on a website for a client over the past couple of weeks. i hand-coded all the layout in CSS with some clever PHP stuff going on in the background to make it easy for me to update the content, as and when and i finally got everything finished [or so i thought]. last night. after making sure every page validated as XHTML 1,1 strict [no easy feat!] i checked it in camino, safari, opera, netscape, firefox and navigator and everything was peachy - as near as dammit identical on every browser - uploaded it to the client's server and went to bed a relaxed, happy boy.

[you know what's coming, don't you? ]

just before i went to bed, i emailed a PC-using mate and asked him to take a look at the site and send me a few screenshots, coz i know from experience that, even with CSS coming out of its ears, it's almost impossible to get text identical across macs and PCs - so i was expecting to maybe have to tweak a font declaration here and there.

anyway, this morning the screenshots arrived....

shop section [as viewed on every feckin' browser i possess!]


shop section [as viewed on internet-bastard-exploder!]



no time to try and put things right before the client saw the site this morning, as i was working at college. so i had to leave the messed up site as it was and head off to work. i'd been helping one of the students with some PHP/mySQL stuff on a website he'd been doing with a user management/admin section. we'd spent the last week or so designing it and it was running like a treat on our trusty oul' apache servers running on our OSX boxes. when i got to college today , he told me he'd uploaded the site to his client's webserver and it was no longer working.

i sat down at a comp and called up the login page to take a look - and the first thing i see is a f***kin microsoft server error message

so i ended up spending about two fruitless hours with that student today, trying vainly to track down the reason why a pretty straightforward script, which was running perfectly on a unix server, was crashing and burning for no explainable reason once it was uploaded to a POS windoze server.

then, after i got home, stressed and frazzled from college, and grabbed a quick bit to eat, it was back to my own site again.

deciding that i needed to be able to test locally with IE for windoze, i was forced [not possessing a PC] to install virtual PC on my poor defenceless powerbook. i felt as guilty as a punter who's just caught a dose off a syphillitic crack-whore and then gone home and slept with his wife, as i polluted my wee aluminium buddy with foul cancerous microsoft bytes.

anyway, once that ordeal was over, i settled down to several fun hours of hacking away at my lovely clean website code, trying to get the bugger to display the same on that rancid excuse for a browser, internet explorer, as it seemed to be able to do, without a problem on every other browser i threw at it.

in the end, IE just maddeningly refused to align those three wee buttons [two of which are actually form elements - hence the CSS complexities], until i threw in the towel and put them in a table.

so much for trying to use standards compliant code - i'd have saved myself a load of time and hair-tearing-out in the first place, if i'd just designed the bastardo site in microshit frontpage, using several hundred nested tables for positioning!

do you ever wish you did a 'real' job like digging ditches or banging pieces of metal with a big hammer?!

[Cubeoid]

Originally Posted by m a d r a

do you ever wish you did a 'real' job like digging ditches or banging pieces of metal with a big hammer?!

I just got a job at a supermarket placing products on shelves all night.

[tooki]

Why didn't you just try the IE-fixit-hack (called IE7, though it works on IE5+) mentioned in the sticky thread of the Web Developer forum here? One line of code, and a small directory of scripts, and IE behaves almost exactly like a real browser. (Saved me a TON of work on a project.)

tooki

[Railroader]

Originally Posted by m a d r a

do you ever wish you did a 'real' job like digging ditches or banging pieces of metal with a big hammer?!

I do. And LOVE it.

But I know where you're coming from. I used to have a job drafting with AutoCAD. Our office used to keep very up to date in the latest versions of the software. Occasionally we'd have to send a file out and downgrade it to a earlier version for a client and they'd bitch up a storm because everything was screwed up. Later we'd find out they weren't even using AutoCad, but a AutoCAD file viewer or CADCAM or VersaCAD.

I feel your pain.

[milhous]

damn, if it was for a personal website i'd tell you to just leave it at strict validation and offer an explanatory note to IE users stating why things may look weird. you would then of course have to plug firefox or another browser for them to see things correctly.

but for a client, you can't tell them such a thing because their business depends on it. unfortunately, the majority of businesses still rely on ie as the gold-standard because of it's install base.

not a web developer myself, are there any other standards or methodologies that you could use to accomodate ie without having to write lots of ie-specific code?

[ghporter]

I have to say that I gave up IE a long time ago, not just beacuse of its security issues, either. I really hated the fact that IE (in ANY version) would render pages the way it bloody well felt like it. Standards? Compliance?

So anyway m a d r a, when I visit your site, I'm going to see just what you intended, no matter what.

[himself]

Originally Posted by tooki

Why didn't you just try the IE-fixit-hack (called IE7, though it works on IE5+) mentioned in the sticky thread of the Web Developer forum here? One line of code, and a small directory of scripts, and IE behaves almost exactly like a real browser. (Saved me a TON of work on a project.)

tooki

yes, likely the answer to all of your IE problems.

[tooki]

Originally Posted by milhous

not a web developer myself, are there any other standards or methodologies that you could use to accomodate ie without having to write lots of ie-specific code?

The patch I referred to is almost completely perfect. I don't know why more developers don't use it.

tooki

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by tooki

The patch I referred to is almost completely perfect. I don't know why more developers don't use it.

Lack of knowledge about it ?

[m a d r a]

Originally Posted by tooki

The patch I referred to is almost completely perfect. I don't know why more developers don't use it.

tooki

Originally Posted by what_the_heck

Lack of knowledge about it ?

in my case, yes

i'm not really sure what it's all about [even after reading through that thread and visiting the IE7 site! ]. i get the impression it's a load of javascript hacks and custom CSS which you've got to attach to your pages to make them display properly in IE. i may be wrong about that [and if so, i welcome correction], but if that *is* the case, then it disnae seem a much better solution than any of the other hacks around. why would i want to clutter up my site pages with a bunch of javascript hacks, any more than i'd want to throw a load of cruddy tables into them?

[ReggieX]

Originally Posted by m a d r a

after making sure every page validated as XHTML 1,1 strict

Mistake #1.

[wdlove]

Originally Posted by Cubeoid

I just got a job at a supermarket placing products on shelves all night.

I'm very proud of Cubeoid. My very close friend. He is awesome.

[m a d r a]

Originally Posted by ReggieX

Mistake #1.

yeah, i know - i get a bit anally retentive about it sometimes; i'll get a page to validate as XHTML 1,0 transitional, which should be enough. but then i cannae help rising to the challenge of trying to tweak it to validate as XHTML 1,0 strict - [there's something kind of woolly and imprecise sounding about that "transitional" bit, that irks me somehow]. from there, it's only a matter of time til that wee voice in my head starts saying "go on! - show them you're a *real* pixel monkey! - see if you can make it validate as XHTML 1,1 strict!"

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

My current site was done in CSS and I was actually surprised how well it worked in IE.

[awarenessengine]

Mate, get yourself a copy of VirtualPC or a cheap second PC for testing. I know where you're coming from. Microsoft doesn't give a crap about other standards, hence IE7.

[Eug Wanker]

Out of interest's sake, does IE 5.2 for Mac show the same problem? Just wondering. Also, does the IE hack work for IE 5.2 for Mac too?

Originally Posted by awarenessengine

Mate, get yourself a copy of VirtualPC or a cheap second PC for testing. I know where you're coming from. Microsoft doesn't give a crap about other standards, hence IE7.

He said he installed VPC.

[himself]

Originally Posted by m a d r a

i'm not really sure what it's all about [even after reading through that thread and visiting the IE7 site! ]. i get the impression it's a load of javascript hacks and custom CSS which you've got to attach to your pages to make them display properly in IE. i may be wrong about that [and if so, i welcome correction], but if that *is* the case, then it disnae seem a much better solution than any of the other hacks around. why would i want to clutter up my site pages with a bunch of javascript hacks, any more than i'd want to throw a load of cruddy tables into them?

there is no significant clutter involved. this is the only code you need to add:

Code:
<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<script src="/ie7/ie7-standard-p.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<![endif]-->

believe me, it will make your job much easier, with only minor drawbacks, if any.

[olePigeon]

Originally Posted by himself

there is no significant clutter involved. this is the only code you need to add:

Code:
<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<script src="/ie7/ie7-standard-p.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<![endif]-->

believe me, it will make your job much easier, with only minor drawbacks, if any.

Too bad it doesn't delete client side ActiveX and slap Microsoft.

[m a d r a]

Originally Posted by himself

there is no significant clutter involved. this is the only code you need to add:

Code:
<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<script src="/ie7/ie7-standard-p.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<![endif]-->

believe me, it will make your job much easier, with only minor drawbacks, if any.

ok - but does IE7 do some 'browser sniffing' then and only include its various kludges and javascripts if the visitor is misguided enough to be using "internet exploder"? - or is it all included anyway, even if the visitor is using a 'real' browser?

[Chris O'Brien]

IE is the only browser to understand the condition put there ([if lt IE 7]) so the script wont be included in any other browser as it's just an HTML comment to them, not something to actually do.

[Kerrigan]

desktop

[m a d r a]

Originally Posted by Chris O'Brien

IE is the only browser to understand the condition put there ([if lt IE 7]) so the script wont be included in any other browser as it's just an HTML comment to them, not something to actually do.

OK. that sounds interesting. i'll have to check this IE7 out then.

[scaught]

Originally Posted by wdlove

I'm very proud of Cubeoid. My very close friend. He is awesome.

you are so fscking weird

[mania]

i feel your pain.