NOW PLAYING: Standards, Dammit!

22 September, 1998
I really despise the damned 'Browser Wars.' I despise Micro$oft, too, not only for perpetuating and contributing to the 'Wars' but also because they make such crummy bloatware...

Anyway, the Cascading Stylesheets that I'm using on this section worked fine in any of the browsers I've tested except Internet Exploder 4.0 on the Mac. I didn't find this out until today, since my personal Macs are Micro$oft-free machines. But I happened to take a peek here on my G3 PowerMac at the office, and lo-and-behold: half the page appeared to be chopped off! The pages looked fine in M$IE version 3. Version 4 for Windoze is OK, too. The Netscape browsers (v2 through v4) are alright with it. That's as much testing as I have machines and browsers for.

So I spent an hour or two trying this and that, and it finally seemed to work. I still don't know which change was the key (since I was a Bad Boy and made a few changes at the same time, something which you're never supposed to do when debugging). Oh well.

I think it's okay now. Except that I'm still pissed that the browser-makers can't get their acts together. If you feel that way too, look into the Web Standards Project.

UPDATE— Here it is, January 2002, and I'm having to go through some 65 documents and modify them because of the way IE 6 interprets the <center> tag (yes, I know it's deprecated... but it sees <div align="center"> in the exact same way). Seems that the wizards at Micro$oft have decided to have IE center everything after either one of those tags — including text, etc. inside of tables — until the tag is closed. So all the sites that I've built that employ either of those tags to center a layout on a page are now going to have all the content centered for those viewers using IE 6. Isn't that lovely?

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