Rarely do I rant and rave about Internet Explorer on this site. It is especially rare nowadays that I post anything technology related on the blog. However, given what I have went through in the last two hours, I feel I need to vent to the public at large. I HATE INTERNET EXPLORER! I really wish Microsoft would have gotten the browser right way back in 2001. Recently, most of the security holes have been patched, however, the boys in Redmond haven’t touched the underlying rendering engine since the browser was launched. Now, for people who do not develop websites, that’s not really a big deal. For people like me who strive to build standards-compliant sites that also look nice, IE is like a plague. IE mucks up every standardized computer language that is supposed to make web pages look right no matter how you choose to view them.
The new position of the navigation bar (just below the main title) took about 20 times longer than it should to implement. Why? BECAUSE IE HAS A BUG DEALING WITH WHITESPACE THAT HAS BEEN AROUND SINCE 1997! Now, as an experienced web designer, I should have remembered that the bug was there and been able to fix it without a lot of thought. It has been forever since I attempted the technique I used, so my knowledge of the bug had erroded. But, I got to thinking, why should I have to worry about the bug? IT’S 2006! MICROSOFT, FIX THE DARN THING ALREADY!
I have actually broken a big-time rule of web design: My page doesn’t render the same on all browsers. In order to see the page exactly how it is supposed to appear, you’ll need to download Firefox. If you’re using Internet Explorer, you’ll probably notice the black navigation bar is skinny. Well, it’s supposed to be a bit fatter and the links are supposed to be evenly spaced. I decided I wasn’t going to throw my design out the window just because of IE’s bug. I know, I know: Good web designers work around the bugs. Well, even with the bug, the design is functional. It’s just not as pretty. Oh well, as any of you know, I’ll re-design the site around Christmas.
The Bright Side: I suppose if that’s the only thing I have to complain about, then life must be going pretty good. In fact, that is exactly the case. Married life is awesome. I love Becca more and more every day, and I don’t care who knows it! I shall return to my teaching duties in a couple days, and I fully expect this to be the most productive year yet! I want to do the best job I can do to help my kids achieve as much as I know they can. One thing’s for sure, though: I now have what every man needs. A good woman behind him. I LOVE YOU BECCA!
Heya, I can see there’s been more work going on (obviously, I know =p ). I shouldn’t add to your design woes, but honestly I loved how it was earlier, where the menu buttons weren’t across the whole of the top but, rather, snug in the upper right hand.
Of course I know I’m saying this while running a widescreen high resolution, so maybe it looked crappy on more convention monitor resolutions.
Hey baby,
I just wanted you to know that I love you too! And yes, of course, I’m behind you 100% all day, everyday! Your post made me sad…I wish I could be there with you! I can’t wait to see you tonight ; )
I think it’s pretty much a concrete fact now that just about all web designers HATE IE. I keep hearing good things about the new version of the browser that’s suppose to be coming out, how it’ll work better but, we all know how that goes sometimes. I think at some point Microsoft just stopped giving a flying fig about browsers, Firefox is good because it’s versatile and you know actually WORKS. I think whenever you design any website/page/etc. your always gonna have something that doesn’t look perfect, I mean somewhere in the world there is that one person with a really really really old version of IE that refuses to even upgrade to what IE is now. I’d really like Microsoft to go "Hey guys/gals you know what, we are just gonna stop making browsers and replace all of the IE software with Firefox, sorry about the past versions…our bad"
Well, Jeremy, as I have found myself many times in the past, I feel I must defend this design. The top navigation that was aligned to the right had some problems, both in technically and asthetically. Technically, in order to get the links to appear in the order I wanted on screen, I had to list the links in reverse order. The Home link, which was farthest left was actually the last link in the sequence. Search engines read from top to bottom, and many folks in the search engine optimization business say that links found at the top of the page are given more weight. The current nav bar has the links listed in code the same way they appear on the screen.
The other major technical disadvantage is that there was absolutely zero way to get the text in the links to be centered vertically without resorting to archaic table structures. If you’ll notice, the site has been XHTML 1.0 compliant for about four months now. XHTML discourages the use of tables for layout. I wouldn’t have to worry about that if everybody was running 1024 x 768 because I could have made the buttons as such so that all the links fit on one line (as they do now). However, 25% of my visitors, most of whom I assume are teachers looking at my portfolio, run at the Windows XP standard of 800 x 600. I didn’t want to remove any of the links and I wanted them all to be on one line. So I went back to the drawing board and rewrote the bar so that it functions correctly at "conventional resolutions" :)
Asthetically, I didn’t really like the bar being aligned right because people read left to right. I didn’t want any random people that Google shot my way to leave the site without ever seeing their navigation options. Honestly, the top navigation concept scares me a little . The side navigation that I have always used commands that your eye looks at it because that part of the screen is devoted just to navigaton. I hope my blog titles don’t overpower the nav buttons. I know my regular readers have enough sense to figure out the change, but potential new readers may not be as patient. This is paranoia, but you always gotta look at that sort of thing when you make changes. Besides, I’m breaking my own patterns here, which is always a very scary thing for me to do.
Anyway, thanks for the feedback. I’ll probably end up changing the navigation again anyway because I don’t think I can stand the inconsistency between the Firefox render and the IE render.
Well I only moderately loved the right-aligned top menu moreso than this one anyway : ) Which is why it worries me that you already want to change it. I do hope you keep it up top, at least. I don’t really think anything — such as your blog titles — drown out the menu as it is.
(Oh, and I forgot to mention before, I like the smooth transitions from black to blue when you mouse over the menu buttons. Nice touch)
I, too, am very fond of the buttons blending into the blue with a mouseover. It calms me!