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.

Ok, maybe not CSS, but someone surely does.

Recently, in addition to the redesign of this site, I did a redesign for Ribit. I wanted to break out of the standard web layouts, the ubiquitous two column, navigation left or across the top concept that seems to dominate the web. I also wanted to some of the more esoteric technology available to create some interesting effects using CSS and the DIV tag.

To my chagrin, I found that while you can do some really cool stuff these days using CSS and DIV, it breaks down in – you guessed it – Internet Explorer. IE literally ignores about half of the current parameters that are built into the CSS standard. My biggest pain while doing the two aforementioned sites was the dreaded "fixed" position statement for DIV tag layers. You see those columns of textured color on the right? Notice how they do not move? Well, if one is designing strictly for standards compliant browsers such as Firefox or Apple's Safari, one can get that neat effect by simply creating a DIV layer, giving it the appropriate size and position, and then adding the following to the CSS code:

That's it. One line, a total of 15 keystrokes. Beautiful. And then you look at it in IE, and not only is not not fixed, but all of your position coordinates are ignored, so the layer ends thrown far and wide from your intended placement.

After a bit of research, I found that there is a workaround. It involves the use of a proprietary IE technology called Conditional Comments. A conditional comment is a way of having the browser use a different or modified set of CSS instructions. Conditional Comments are only recognized by IE, of course, so what they are really for is allowing workarounds like what I had to use to make things look the way I wanted in IE. A Conditional Comment look like this:

By using this method, one is able make IE use an auxiliary CSS, overriding the standard compliant CSS you originally created. In this case, to get the fixed position effect, I had to specify CSS that eliminated scrolling from the page, and put it back in using a DIV layer that filled the page top to bottom. Anything that scrolled had to go inside this nested DIV, anything fixed had to go outside. This necessitated adding many lines of code in the CSS, and a few lines in the page headers as well. Not even counting the time to research and discover this workaround, it put me many hours behind on these projects and killed my productivity, all because the highly paid programmers at Microsoft can't be bothered to implement a simple CSS standard, one which is easily implemented in all other browsers, including those that are open source projects with unpaid developers. Now, that was aggravating enough, and I steamed about it for a few days, and then an even worse thought hit me.

Microsoft was unwilling to spend the time to implement standard CSS, that much is obvious. But they did take the time to implement a proprietary system of conditional comments to allow work arounds for certain CSS styles. Why did they not spend those development resources implementing the standard? They obviously have the resources, why don't they use them wisely? Is this incompetence or malice? Microsoft has a history of attempting to overturn any standard that is not in their control, this is well-documented. Are they attempting the same thing here?

I have no proof either way, obviously, but I think I can say with some confidence that either that level of incompetence or that sort of malice is unacceptable in a company that dominates the market the way they do.

Or: Why Apple Moving to Intel Chips is No Big Deal

So by now all of those who pay attention to such things have heard. On Monday, June 6th at the 2005 WWDC, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be gradually transitioning their systems from the PowerPC chips supplied by IBM to some form of chip from Intel.

So?

Keep in mind, this is not the "so?" of a non-Mac-using PC-head. This is the "so?" of a Mac-loving, Microsoft-hating, graphic artist who's credentials as a rabid Mac Zealot are doubted by no one. You are reading the words of a man who once turned down a paying job because they wanted me to work on a Windows toybox, telling the prospective employer "I cannot work for someone who will not allow me to use the proper tools to do the job. Asking anyone to actually do work on a Windows machine is the same as telling your mechanic he has to fix everything on your Mercedes with a Sledge Hammer."

But I digress. As usual.

The reason I say "so" to this big news is that it doesn't affect me. Or you. Or really anyone at this point, other than developers of applications that run on Mac OSX. My system, a venerable Dual 450 MHZ G4, still works. The system I am about to acquire, a young and exciting Dual 2.3 GHZ G5, will also work. It will serve me for 5 years just as my beloved G4 has done. The system you have now will continue to work beautifully (provided you are on a Mac, if you are on Windows, your system never worked well). Any system you buy from now until the Intel transition is complete, and indeed afterwards, will work perfectly well. The transition will, for the users, be totally transparent. We will probably be only peripherally aware it has even happened.

If you are a developer, things will be different for you. You will have to tweak some of your code over the next year. But, seriously, wouldn't you be doing that anyway? No developer I know sits on their butt for a year at a time and does not touch their code. So basically developers are simply going to be tweaking their code, like they would do anyway, over the next year or so. Surely a nightmare come true (note sarcasm).

Another little bit of twaddle I keep hearing in places like the MacAddict Forums is that developers are "angry" at this news.

Huh?

I watched that Quicktime stream of the keynote. I heard the reaction. Sounded to me like the developers were pretty damn happy. This was the audience at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference. This isn't some consumer expo. The people in the audience enthusiastically applauding were the developers. They were the very people that are going to be doing those tweaks to their code. They sounded pretty hyped over the news. I'll take that reaction as a barometer over the uninformed and formless comments of some dink on a message board any day, thank you.

I think the comments by Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen best captured the attitude of developers when he took the stage with Steve Jobs on Monday and said, referring to the switch to Intel, "What took you so long?"