The Bane of Web Design
Very rarely do I feel the need to rant on DesignAday. I spent hours today trying to solve what should be a very simple layout issue. I have a variable width div that I need to center within the window. I achieved this without a problem in Safari and Firefox. True to form, IE threw a wrench in the works.
In IE, the div is expanding to fill the width of the screen, instead of fitting to the width of its content. I spent hours trying to fix it. I finally figured out that IE doesn’t like the fact that I have some content within the div that I have floated right. I must have tried a dozen different approaches this afternoon to get some semblance of the layout I have designed, but to no avail. By the time I left the office, I had retreated to a fixed width div in which long lines of content will truncate with an ellipsis. However, there is a new layout issue plaguing me that I’m still trying to resolve. At this rate, I’m going to be resorting to using a table.
IE truly is the bane of web development. I would love to see a tally of the man hours spent troubleshooting its incompatibilities with web standards. I fervently wish we could forget about it—stop supporting it—and tell our customers to get a real web browser. But we can’t. IE has a chokehold on the industries in which our products are used. It has only been within the past year that we’ve been able to stop developing for IE 6 (what a nightmare that was)! I know IE 8 is a significant improvement, but I’ll be stuck developing for 7 in the foreseeable future.
Rant over. We’ll now return to our regular programming.
