Oh, Internet Explorer. Words cannot express my loathing.
In developing my new site layout I’ve been sticking strictly with clean XHTML and using CSS for 100% of my formatting. I just made the final little updates that make all of my templates validate as XHTML 1.1! It feels really good to be writing standards-compliant code and having it create an appealing user experience.
Now, I had kind of expected that IE users would get a somewhat less-pretty experience but had assumed at they would at least get a usable one. I’ve since discovered that I was wrong. My current main problem, which I may have solved somewhat, is that IE doesn’t support position:fixed (used to keep portions of the sidebar from scrolling). Since position: fixed is a version of position: absolute that doesn’t scroll with the viewport, I’d be happy to have the elements default back to position:absolute in IE, but even that seems to cause problems as the top bar doesn’t seem to properly inherit things from the side bar. Phooey.
As an expression of my frustration, I’ve used the Brilliant Button Maker to create the following little 80×15 button:
In other web-related news, I’ve discovered that every browser except Safari seems to hate garamond. Even if I have it installed on the computer i’m working on, Firefox and Opera (now freeee) both render my type in Times. This is confusing.