I would just like to announce that I hate, hate, hate Internet Explorer.
As I understand it, at one point, all the major forces involved in programming for the Web got together and agreed on something called CSS, which is short for “cascading style sheets.” To oversimplify a bit, it’s a way of controlling the look of webpages.
After agreeing on how CSS would work, everybody went home and started coding browsers that would deal with CSS properly. Except for Microsoft. They went off and coded a $(*&% browser that implements a bunch of features completely wrongly.
So, right now, I’m I’m working on a new feature for the PR site for my book. It’s ready to go, except for one problem–it looks like crap in Internet Explorer. So my options are:
1. Release it with proper CSS coding, thereby making it look like crap in one of the most commonly used browsers on the planet;
2. Rewrite it with crappy CSS coding, so that it looks good in Internet Explorer but crappy everywhere else;
3. Come up with a clever hack that will make the various bugs in Explorer cancel each other out, so that the page looks equally good in all browsers.
A real programmer would have no trouble doing #3. Indeed, google for “Explorer CSS hack” and you’ll get tens of thousands of resuls. But the problem is, I’m not a programmer. I’m a writer, just trying to cobble together a funny website for a funny book. I really don’t want to spend day after %(*&ing day muddling around just to get the (*&$£ing text to line up properly in $(*&ing Internet Explorer.