WARNING: The following is an utter rant… You have now been duly warned.

I want to get a big red logo that says “This Site Suckified by Internet Explorer” and paste it on every web site that had to hack around CSS and JavaScript bugs in Internet explorer. I estimate (via extraction out of the sub-navel-olfactory-offending-orifice) that the traffic for downloading the image would exceed all other Internet traffic (excluding porn and spam). That’s because it’s virtually impossible to make a modern, stylesheet driven site without having to substantially work around bizarre “interpretations” of the specs by IE.

You can more or less count on most modern browsers like Firefox, Safari, or Opera working according to the actual spec. If you develop your site using any of these you should get a reasonably consistent outcome when you run it on the others. Having then completed 15% of your work you can spend the remaining 85% of your time discovering wonderful tidbits like: anything floated will break something, there is weird whitespace messing up alignments in 20 places, on Tuesdays when the MSDN site has red buttons all DIVs revert text to RTL, etc.

I don’t want to sound selfish, I mean, who am I to ask a big, important company like Microsoft to adhere to standards they helped set? It’s just that we have to think of the children. Last year alone, more that 200 quadrillion sand-dollars were spent developing web sites and web-based applications. How many times did little Timmy look up with his sorrowful eyes and ask: “Mommy, why doesn’t daddy come home anymore?” Only to hear the reply, “Don’t worry honey, dad will come home eventually. It’s just that Mr Gates wants him to discover the joys of converting transparent-background-PNG files into twelve different colors of GIFs. He said it’ll only be another few hours. By the way, do you know Mr. Smith? He’s our plumber.” My careful research indicates that converting DIV based layouts to TABLEs in order to get alignments working singlehandedly accounted for a 10% drop in attendance at Disneyland last year (which may help explain the Disney-Apple connection).

I understand that in the 253 years (Internet years that is) since IE was last updated MS has been very busy defending itself from anti-trust lawsuits, and looking for ways to convince people that there is a meaningful difference between office 2000 and office 2005, so it’s completely understandable that they just didn’t get around to fixing… well, anything. The good news is that very soon now we can expect IE7 (and this is purely a coincidence with the rise of Firefox as a meaningful competitor). Too bad it won’t run on a few older (unsupported) versions of windows, people can surely upgrade to Vista.

So if you’re using IE and you see something wierd on this site do me a favor and rather than sending me an email, just switch to Firefox. My son has a baseball game and I’m not going to miss it for Bill.