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website design techniques » September 2004: “Hacking The Night Away”
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Hacking The Night Away
by John Barrick
Someone pointed out that Way Cool Web Design likes drawing attention to the fact that that they can and do code for the lumbering MacIE5.2.3, yet last month's Web Techniques column didn’t discuss anything about the Mac. Can you guess where this month’s column is going?
A Browser For No Season
It wasn't all that many moons ago that I was in love with Internet Explorer for the Mac. During that same time, I developed a loathing for Netscape. How I came to be almost diametrically opposed in my feelings about these browsers is a boring story but I hope you make the same journey if you haven’t already.
Although Netscape is dead, its ghost lives on in very good form. Other Mozilla based browsers carry the torch now, and by golly they’re more like Klieg lights now, not torches. Mozilla FireFox is an absolute joy. Well, absolute if browsers make you happy, I suppose.
Internet Explorer for Mac is a weird little hobgoblin. I used to cherish it so. I guess now that maybe it had something to do with the feeling it gave me — a little bit of acceptance “in the real world,” where PC users frolick and play with nary a concern for compatibility issues.
Dr. Gates-enstein’s Monster
So anyway, thanks, Microsoft, for the good times. I do appreciate the attempt at putting a good browser on the Mac. I used it faithfully for a couple years.
It wasn’t until I really started getting into CSS that I discovered MacIE for what it is — a strange conglomeration of standards compliance in some cases and disregard for standards in other places. It actually does a pretty good job with CSS but darn if it doesn’t just explode in the cases where it doesn’t support some code.
Essentially, I code for FireFox, then hack for PCIE, then tweak that for MacIE. More often than not, whatever hacks I’ve added for PCIE need to be filtered out for MacIE. After that, occasionally, there’s just a few MacIE leftovers that really need special attention. That brings us to the Site Map for this web site, which we discussed last month.