If you are wondering why this site does not like quite right, you are probably being the innocent victim of Microsoft reluctance to fix one of the many incompatibilities in their browser. As many web designers know too well, when it comes to web standards like CSS, there are all the standard browsers and then there is IE. For years, Microsoft has been paying lip service to its desire to support web standards, but has shown no progress in providing a browser that will support those standards. You might think that all software have bugs and that it’s difficult to support a standard. The fundamental issue is that all other browsers do a good job at supporting those standards and render html content as expected. Here is an existence proof of what I mean.
I took snapshot of this very site rendered in various browsers and here is was it looks like:
| Mozilla Firefox 1.0.1 (OS X) | Safari 1.2.4 (OS X) |
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Opera 7.54 (OS X) | Camino 0.8.2 (OS X) |
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Here is what it looks like in Internet Explorer. Problem areas have been shaded.
| Internet Explorer 5.2.3 (OS X) | Internet Explorer 6.0 (Windows XP) |
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What’s interesting is that the latest version of IE is not capable of rendering properly the background of a <DIV> section. The older IE for Mac, which was release in 2001 renders the background properly, but has some trouble with the styling of the list elements for the navigation menu. Microsoft is working on a IE 7.0 release, but according to this article it’s becoming clear that they will not fully support CSS 2.0 standard. Instead of waiting for them to get their act together, why not switch to a browser that works?
