so i got a new job working for a local independent graphic designer / printer and its pretty nice. i get to work when i want, at my own pace, from home, doing what i love, and get paid for it. the only thing about it that really sucks is that i’m doing web design and as any semi-serious web designer that works for clients will tell you, coding for cross-browser compatibility SUCKS !!
i mean, why can’t all the browsers stop the damn browser wars and come to an agreement on what will and will not be supported? it seems that the w3c has been doing a good job with stating what should be standard and what should not be standard, and most browsers do a pretty god job following those standards.
except one. microsoft’s internet explorer, the number one used browser on the planet. it works the way it wants to work, and getting your site to look the way you want it to in internet explorer is like trying to teach a four year old how to fly a plane. they may get some things right, but most of the time, they budge things up so bad, you have no idea what they are trying to do. and then all of a sudden, they don’t want to do anything anymore. it is the most annoying thing on the planet, because fixing one thing breaks another and when you get it all looking good in internet explorer and then go back and open up the same page in firefox (my personal favorite and most likely the favorite browser of any self-respecting web designer / aficionado) it looks totally whacked and nothing is where it is supposed to be.
and that’s not even considering the dinosaurs out there, who just absolutely have to have thier netscape communicator 4.75, which has almost no current standards support and what it does support (obsolete and completely annoying things like ‘blink’) it supports badly or is no longer a web standard.
but that’s okay, i figure anybody using web browsers older than the wheel are probably used to things looking all messed up, or they are too computer illiterate to care.
i eagerly await the release of internet explorer 7 (which has taken several years, because microsoft, in all thier wisdom, thought, “we have the monopoly on web browsers, why fuck with it?”. that is, until firefox started taking thier precious users and microsoft just HAS to have the monopoly) because that will mean (hopefully) that interent explorer will finally have decent web standards and png support and i won’t have to keep writing several versions of the same page just to get it to look right everywhere. (but hopefully it will still be subject to the same css hacks, so in case it does mess something up, i wont have to rewrite everything to fix it.)
now all we need is to kill off the dinosaurs and we’ll be all set.