Nearly 4 years ago, I wrote, in one of the first ever of my incredibly…um…occasional…blog entires, of my issues in making what should have been a relatively simple design layout work properly in Windows Internet Explorer.

Well, last week it happened again.

But worse.

This time, the layout was really simple, none of my usual attempts to push HTML to the breaking point. It was a very simple 2 column layout. I wanted the left column to remain fixed in place so the navigation elements did not scroll off the page, and used what should have been an IE friendly solution in CSS to make it happen. There was one catch, however. The site (which is not yet complete and live as of this writing) was for an interior designer, and contained a portfolio section for display of photos of the spaces they have designed. To show off the photos in a large size I used a great little script package called Lightwindow. It works by creating floating layers on the fly with javascript and placing the desired content inside the resulting window-within-the-window.

Everything worked great until, as usual, I tried it out in Windows IE. There, when one dismissed the floating window, several of the layout elements on the page disappeared or moved. For no good reason. It took about 6 hours of trial and error to discover that a CSS parameter* in one of my DIV tags was confusing IE when used in conjunction with the Lightwindow scripts. I want to be clear here, Lightwindow works fine with IE, the problem was not with the script at all. The problem was with the Miscrosoft developers who are too lazy or maybe just too stupid to implement standards that everyone else has no problem implementing.

Just to put that in perspective, Firefox, Safari, Omniweb, and Konqueror had no problem whatever with combination of the script and the CSS parameter I used. Only Windows IE had a problem with it. Of the browsers that worked, 2 of them are open source projects, one is by a major corporation and the last is by a small development house that makes cool software for Mac OS X. So, of those, only one set of developers is paid much, and 2 sets are not paid at all. And yet, somehow, all of them managed something that the FREAKING MILLIONAIRES at Microsoft could not handle.

Please, follow the links I posted above to the web sites of those browsers that work. Stop using IE. For my sanity.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 11th, 2009 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Rants, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.