[antimedia] antimedia: Thoughts on irritating technology....

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Posted by antimedia:
Thoughts on irritating technology....
http://www.antimedia.us/posts/1172115217.shtml


   ....Some of you may have noticed that I created a menu directly below
   the image at the top of my blog, and I moved some things from the
   sidebar up to the menu I'd created. I spent hours and hours reading up
   on style sheets and playing around with settings until I got
   everything to look exactly the way I wanted it to (in Firefox on this
   Mac.)
   Then I looked at it in another browser (Safari on this Mac). I made a
   few more changes until it looked good in both.
   Then I looked at it in two other browsers (Firefox and Konqueror on my
   FreeBSD box at work.) It still looked pretty good (although not
   perfect), and I was happy with the results, so I made the changes on
   the blog.
   Then I looked at it in Internet Explorer on Windows. The menu wasn't
   even there! Back to the drawing board. :-(
   After several more hours of work, I finally figured out how to get the
   menu to show up in the right place in IE without screwing it up
   totally in everything else.
   So, to those of you who use IE on Windows (about 60% of my readers), I
   apologize that your browser doesn't seem to know what 728px means.
   That's why the purple bleeds over past the right edge of the image.
   (Those of you who use other browsers have no idea what I'm talking
   about, I know. Don't worry about it.)
   I was going to try to figure out dropdown menus using styles only (no
   Javascript), but forget it. There's no way it would look good in every
   browser Even Firefox doesn't render the menus the same in every OS! On
   this Mac, the dropdowns line up perfectly with the menu box above. On
   FreeBSD and Windows, they're indented to the right.
   That's the world we live in. Because the stupid browser manufacturers
   can't even decide on a common meaning for the [1]standards for all web
   browsers, it takes boatloads of work just to make one silly little
   menu look right.
   I have no idea how the professional web developers manage to live from
   one day 'til the next without going stark raving mad.
   One last thought. Update your browser. If you're not running Firefox
   2.0, IE 6 or better (preferably 7) or Netscape 8.2, you need to
   update. Every browser has exploitable weaknesses and needs to be
   updated regularly. Amost 60% of you are out of date. :-)

References

   1. http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/