As I re-learn to develop web pages and learn more about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), it has become apparently frustrating how a simple page can look nice sitting in Mozilla’s Firefox or even Apple’s Safari but come out looking crappy on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. And it amazes me how a large software company like Microsoft is able force feed its users to use its incapable browser. Sure, I read that IE7 will resolve all the CSS output problems it has seen since IE5 through IE6 but why can they not just fix all the problems before. In addition, if every Windows OS has Internet Explorer that comes with it, shouldn’t they be on the fore-front and be the most compliant browser available?
The more I become familiar with CSS, it is apparent of the flaws that are in Internet Explorer. It is frustrating when you create a table and set the height to be 100px and it does not output it correctly. Instead, you need to find hacks to trick the Internet Explorer browser in reading a second line of embedded CSS code so that it will display it properly in a browser window. And in some instances, you have to embed a Java script to enable some functions that Firefox or even Safari can do such as those cool looking dynamic menus that pop out. Why all this additional unnecessary fillers? Is it because the programmers at Microsoft are lazy or they just want to differentiate themselves by creating their own standards?
I would expect this during pre-xhtml times when the two main browsers were Netscape and Internet Explorer and each had to create their own display codes to make the web experience more interactive, but now? As we all know, we are in the beginning stages of Web 2.0 and those old browser codes should have been resolved when CSS became a W3C standard in conjunction with xhtml so that all webpages can be easily developed for and be displayed properly in all the browsers.
Finally, maybe I should just give up on making pages look good in Internet Explorer because it order to do so, your website will not be W3C compliant or valid. And if I was focusing on the future, and when IE7 is on everyone’s computer, then all the old web pages written to trick pre-IE7 browsers will need to be redone wasting valuable resources and time. I guess as great as CSS can be, it still has flaws and maybe using images to create a webpage layout or even Flash will be better. I wouldn’t go that route because then my pages will not be seen by most search engines and the pages might take too long to load. One solution to this problem is to create a whole separate CSS sheet that is specifically for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and that may have to be the route I will be going.
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