I hate Internet Explorer

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 Coding, Design, Tips and Tricks

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.

affiliate marketing

Bookmark this article!

BlinkbitsBlinkListsBlogLinesBlogmarksBuddymarksCiteULikeCo.mmentsDel.icio.usDiggDiigo

FarkFeed Me LinksFurlGoogleLinkagogoma.gnoliaNetvouzNewsvinePropellerRawsugar

RedditRojoSimpySphinnSpurlSquidooStumbleUponTailrankTechnoratiYahoo

Tags: , ,

Comments

Monty
February 13th, 2008

Yep, IE is a right royal pain and causes some of the most creative swearing I ever do.

On the colour issue, IE6 (apparently not 7 but haven’t checked) doesn’t render PNG properly. Hence the non-matching colours. More info here : http://biorust.com/tutorials/detail/231/en/

Pete
February 13th, 2008

I’ve found that with I.e if you use png’s and background colour, I.e hates this for some reason.

One quick solution i’ve found for I.e is if something is positioned wrong and fine in ff, its usually a margin issue and you can use padding instead of margin in some cases to rectify it a bit.

I.e 6 is a law unto itself, and as soon as user percentages drop below 30% i’m going to write it off i think.

Tom
February 22nd, 2008

Hey, You sound like your in a similar situation to me!
I’m also on a placement year from my uni course, doing marketing. Just getting into Affiliate stuff in my spare time too, and I’m going to be using Heart Internet’s Reseller package because we use it at work and its an awesome package, way better than anything ive ever seen before. I’ve got one site that i was messing about with but is down at the time of writing (vital-viamins.com), it was just starting to make a bit of money then I had troble with my old hosts “Fast”hosts who i would never use again!
Maybe we could start a joint venture at some point seeing as were in similar situations.

Cheers, Tom

Post a comment

Please add your comments and opinions on this post! All valid contributions are appreciated and nofollow has been removed from links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.