Please stop emailing me about your buggy web browser, since I can’t fix it.
From time to time people complain to me that some of the articles on this site have bad formatting which makes them hard to read. But my HTML isn’t the problem. The problem is your browser. Everyone who complains about this is using Internet Explorer, and IE doesn’t handle CSS correctly.
IE didn’t always have the bug which affects my articles — Microsoft introduced it in one of the IE 6 service packs. That’s why I wrote articles for years which contain the particular combination of HTML and CSS which make the bug show its ugly face. Articles I’ve written since then don’t contain ‘p’ tags inside of ‘blockquote’ tags — I now use ‘br’ instead, even though it isn’t what I really want — but articles written prior to the release of the bug frequently do, and I don’t have time to go back and "fix" them so that you can continue to use your buggy browser.
IE 7 may fix this but if you want to read the older articles on my site in the meantime you’ll need to get a browser that handles CSS correctly.
Update: And for those who think they have worked around all of IE’s CSS bugs, did you think to test with and without XP themes?
{ 7 } Comments
Right on …..
Internet Exploreer 7 gives standards the finger: <http://www.siliconvalleysleuth.com/2005/08/internet_explor.html>
David, although I think IE6’s CSS support is terrible I’m not going to judge IE 7 until it’s released. I think it’s kind of funny to see open-source advocates faulting the IE 7 *beta* for breaking third-party plugins, given the fact that I had to update my Firefox extensions repeatedly as it moved from 0.7 to 1.0. It might be nice if existing IE6 toolbars just work in IE 7, but even if they don’t it’s hardly a cause for scandal.
And of course a beta version of IE is likely to break apps which host MSHTML. Folks who install beta software on their machine need to expect this. It’s not as though Microsoft has been reserved about stating that IE is part of the OS.
I’m just a little tired of being blamed for IE6’s buggy layout.
Good attitude. After all, why worry about the IE users, they only constitute 85% of the browsing public…
Doogal, did you even bother to read what I wrote?
I do consider folks who have to live with IE’s buggy CSS handling; that’s why anything I write currently doesn’t use the HTML/CSS which triggers the bugs recently introduced into IE, even though the HTML I have to use to work around the problem is in a sense improper.
Indeed, if I was unconcerned about IE users I wouldn’t have bothered to write this post.
So can the sarcasm, please. If you want to live with a browser which can’t handle CSS properly, that’s up to you. Just don’t blame me for it.
Yes, I did read what you wrote. As a software developer I have to deal with buggy software all the time. Generally I have to workaround the problems rather than ask my customers to change their database/OS/browser…
BTW I use FireFox, mostly for the tabbed browsing and useful plugins available, not for it’s superior CSS support. In fact, most sites look better in IE to my untrained eyes
Note also that people who read this site are not "my customers." My customers are not developers and don’t read this site. People who read this site are developers who find it worth their time to read technical articles I publish for free and without advertising in my spare time.
Roughly 0.005% or so of the people who want to read the information posted here for free also complain about how it’s presented, FWIW.
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