I thought IE7 was going to be the holy grail that brought global CSS compliance to the masses and made life for the average web designer once again worth living. What happened?!

I’ve been doing CSS development for a couple years now. My standard M.O. is to get the site working perfectly in Firefox, then tweak the CSS to make it IE5/6 friendly. The purpose for this, in theory, is that by developing for Firefox you can pretty much be sure that your code is standards compliant. If it looks good in Firefox, it should look pretty much the same in all standards-compliant browsers. Then you add little tweaks here and there to make it look good in the non-standards-compliant browsers (IE). I generally don’t worry about the smaller browsers – between Firefox and IE5/6 I am covering about 97-99% of the browsers out there, depending on whose stats you believe.

Ironically, I did not follow that procedure when developing my own site, as those of you using IE can attest to right now. Incidentally, today was the first day I actually looked at this site using IE6, and yeah, I was shocked at how mangled it is. So curiosity bit me and I fired up IE7 to see if it really is more standards compliant (as was promised). To my shock and dismay, the site does not look all that different than it does in IE6. But there are differences. I looked at another of my sites which I had perfected for both Firefox and IE5/6, and there were elements of the site that just did not line up right in IE7. This means I am going to need a new bag of tricks to get IE7 to look right without affecting IE5/6.

What is Microsoft trying to do to us?

First, I’m in the process of putting together a review of my trip to New Orleans.  Stay tuned.

Okay, know anyone with an Earthlink email address?  Well, they may want to consider switching ISPs.  Bob Cringely has an interesting article about Earthlink’s email woes that go back at least as far as June, 2006.  How do companies like this stay in business??  From the article:

Swimming upstream through Earthlink customer support, my buddy finally found a technical contact who freely acknowledged the problem. Since June, he was told, Earthlink’s mail system has been so overloaded that some users have been missing up to 90 percent of their incoming e-mail. It isn’t bounced back to senders; it just disappears. And Earthlink hasn’t mentioned the problem to these affected customers unless they complain. The two groups affected are those who get their mail with an Earthlink-hosted domain and those with aliased e-mail addresses like my friend’s Blackberry.