Since about a week, I've been working on a few web designs again. The Spore Zone is coming up, and a lot of work needs to be done for it. There's just one problem:

Internet Explorer

Since Microsoft has until refused to support the standards properly, designing for IE is a pain. I initially make a design for Firefox, these days a fairly common browser (about 10% market share) that does support the standards a lot better than IE. It may not be perfect, but it's a lot closer.

Today I decided to check the progress so far on other browsers. Okay, I'd checked it in IE before so I could make the necessary hacks as soon as I needed them, but I hadn't yet checked any other browsers - or rendering engines for that matter. So on my Linux box I fired up Konqueror and Epiphany (which too uses the Gecko engine, like Firefox/Mozilla), and because Opera crashed I installed a bunch of versions (from 5.0 to the 7.5). And guess what? It looked right on all of them - no hacks necessary. Okay, so Opera had a few problems on versions 6.00 to 6.06, but as of 6.10 (the next version) it's fine again. In 5.00 it works too.

So we launched Sim Brother tonight. With, instead of tables, some proper usage of images and CSS to align all the images and such. Looked great in Firefox, but I knew IE didn't support everything I used. Now I must admit I haven't surfed with IE in ages (except for WindowsUpdate). At first it looked OK in IE, until I had a second look... It had messed up certain widths of several blocks. So it was time...

...to write more hacks.

And testing them...

Finding out a space too many doesn't make IE load the hack (and not even in a filename or so, but somewhere where you could expect placing a space wouldn't hurt too much)...

And then having it fixed... Finally

It took me a while, but I'm glad the problem is solved. Still, this is typically what makes web designing for IE a pain... and Microsoft has admitted it won't completely support CSS2 in IE7, the next version that's due for release with Windows Longhorn or so.

IE is a pain for those who want to do some PROPER web designing. Too bad 90% of the visitors uses that browser, because that's why I simply feel I have to make those hacks.

So yes, Internet Explorer sucks. Time for the masses to drop it, there are enough browsers out there that are a lot better.