Posted: Sun Dec 28, 2008 4:34 am
Last night, I worked on the menu image problem some more. I found a very simple solution that allowed the icons to appear in IE5. Then I fired up my laptop and looked at the site in IE7. The solution doesn't work there, although I was pleased to find that a page alignment problem that affected the entire site in IE5 was corrected in IE7.
Decided to google around and see if there was a CSS trick that I hadn't tried and found entire domains dedicated to the crappy CSS performance of MSIE. The developers of IE apparently know what a failure the product is and have even thrown in a few ways to patch around some of the problems. One way is called "Glitch Mode", which is triggered by the <!doctype header at the top of every page. The other is a switch in the META tags that loads a stylesheet especially tailored to IE.
Anyway, I'll try a few more things before giving up. I did edit the code to a more radical approach that semi-worked in IE6, but I didn't try it in IE7. Since 30% of the viewers of my site use IE7, and only 1% use IE5, if I find a solution to this problem that works in IE7, I'll call it fixed. Someone here may have to do some viewing in IE6, I don't have it loaded on any of my machines. 11% of my viewers still use that.
The good/?bad news is that 20-25% of the page views on the site are through Firefox. It's good news because those people aren't using IE in any form, and possibly bad news because I don't know what FF is doing to my code. Probably time for me to download it and use it just for development research. I'm a quite satisfied Opera user.
Oh, and while the window is open, I failed to disallow search bots on the forum at the new site, and now google has listed a couple of hundred pages on the forum. I've always disallowed robots on the forum because I didn't want the attention from script kiddies that having a phpBB installation poses. Hopefully, they aren[t interested in messing with small cookies like us, -but- things might get interesting after I open up the new site and allow the forum to be listed in directories and search engines. Fasten your seat belt after that, it may be a bumpy ride, and in any case, we will probably have a lot of new friends to play with.
Decided to google around and see if there was a CSS trick that I hadn't tried and found entire domains dedicated to the crappy CSS performance of MSIE. The developers of IE apparently know what a failure the product is and have even thrown in a few ways to patch around some of the problems. One way is called "Glitch Mode", which is triggered by the <!doctype header at the top of every page. The other is a switch in the META tags that loads a stylesheet especially tailored to IE.
Anyway, I'll try a few more things before giving up. I did edit the code to a more radical approach that semi-worked in IE6, but I didn't try it in IE7. Since 30% of the viewers of my site use IE7, and only 1% use IE5, if I find a solution to this problem that works in IE7, I'll call it fixed. Someone here may have to do some viewing in IE6, I don't have it loaded on any of my machines. 11% of my viewers still use that.
The good/?bad news is that 20-25% of the page views on the site are through Firefox. It's good news because those people aren't using IE in any form, and possibly bad news because I don't know what FF is doing to my code. Probably time for me to download it and use it just for development research. I'm a quite satisfied Opera user.
Oh, and while the window is open, I failed to disallow search bots on the forum at the new site, and now google has listed a couple of hundred pages on the forum. I've always disallowed robots on the forum because I didn't want the attention from script kiddies that having a phpBB installation poses. Hopefully, they aren[t interested in messing with small cookies like us, -but- things might get interesting after I open up the new site and allow the forum to be listed in directories and search engines. Fasten your seat belt after that, it may be a bumpy ride, and in any case, we will probably have a lot of new friends to play with.