So I thought I’d take a bit of time this morning to rant about Microsoft’s grand invention known as Internet Explorer (IE). This is really a fenced in issue. On one side of the fence you have IE - loved and used by all - because they don’t know any better. On the other side of the fence you have your Mac people and all the smart computer users who choose another browser.
Now some of you are saying “Jason - that’s pretty harsh to call anyone who uses IE dumb. What about all the websites and such that will only work in IE. It has its strengths.” Unfortunately those strengths are far out-weighed by its weaknesses (in my opinion).
But let me interject a third option to this fence issue. You’re like me - you want to reside on the side of the fence with your fellow Mac users - however you are forced to straddled the fence in a very awkward position (often times without protection) just for the sake of helping those other users on the other, IE, side.
Now it’s no secret that web developers and system administrators around the globe despise that which is IE. Microsoft (in their grand wisdom) decided to support their own set of standards when it comes to things like HTML, XHTML, and CSS. They also decided to unify their web browser with their file browser engine - creating so many security holes it has been hilarious or disastrous (depending on which side of the fence you reside).
Now I’ve learned to deal with IE. I’ve even gone so far as to code almost everything I’ve done to be compliant and look good (that equates to the same) in both IE and other browsers (Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, etc.). My latest quam with IE is the long standing lack of support for PNG 24 files. Now true - you can do some fancy coding and get PNG to render with their alpha transparency in tact. However, I found out the hard way, that this image translation engine can have some strange side effect. The most unique side effect - completely nullifying hyperlinks.
I was using a PNG as a background image of a TD (table cell) and was placing hyperlinks as text within the cell. To my surprise the links wouldn’t appear in IE. They were there in the code - but you couldn’t click on them or anything. You could highlight the text - but still no hyperlinks. Unfortunately for me, my final solution consisted of using PNG 8 files instead of nice PNG 24 files. What happens in this case is that IE drops any and all transparency values and just displays what it can. So if you were to look at the design I was working on - all of my nice drop shadows on images are now gone in IE (sad me).
Now I might try the solution of slicing my images a little differently to go back to using the image translator - but a large part of me wants to boycott. I want this huge disclaimer to appear to a site visitor that reads “I’m sorry you feel so bound to IE - because it’s all you know. Here, why don’t you try a real browser” and point them towards Firefox. Then maybe they’ll get the full feel for my site - as initially intended.
Well now that I’ve ranted enough let me leave everyone with one final thought. Perhaps the only reason we have to put up with crap like this - is because we don’t make enough noise in the process. Here’s to revolution!
