I hate Internet Explorer
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 
Coding, Design, Tips and Tricks 
3 Comments »
Really, I do. I’m not the best coder by any means but I try very hard and hand coding my own websites and they come out alright. Until I switch to Internet Explorer, that is. Coding is difficult enough without having to cater for cross browser compatibility. The first issue is how differently Internet Explorer and Firefox translate pixels, margins and padding and often means a three column layout can look perfect in FF but IE decides to push a column or two to the bottom of the screen simply because it’s 1 pixel too big. This isn’t too bad to resolve; playing around with the numbers usually solves it.
A brilliant solution is the reset css which I found at just searching, which strips out all margins or whatever else the browsers automatically add. For example, the <p> and <h1> tags automatically have quite a significant line-height automatically given to them which can affect the lining up of <div>s. The reset css puts both browsers on a level playing field and gives you complete control of every attribute.
But even with this reset css applied, I noticed a list still had indentation in Internet Explorer which made a navigation sidebar on one of my sites look really strange. The <ul> and <li> tags had no margin, no list-style-type, nothing so why was it doing this? Apparently IE needs a float:left added to the list to really force it to the left. Irritating, but solvable.
But now I’ve come across yet another strange browser compatibility issue - colour! Do browsers translate colours differently? Take a look at this site (under very heavy construction, so watch out for falling code and broken links). In FF, the background-colour of the header image and the div around it is identical but in Internet Explorer, it looks slightly different. Is it just me? Makes me think I should just give up coding and spend the time writing content using Blogger or something like Lee. Or I should drive a car through the front windows of Internet Explorer HQ in a frustrated, sadistic rage.
