Stupid IE CSS Bugs
Dan Cederholm's recent bit about debugging frustrations with CSS and IE are right on the money. I recently upgraded the SIS site to Plone 2.0 (which is a huge improvement over 1.0, btw) and in the process switched from the crusty, table-based templates that were created last summer to a much sleeker, CSS-based layout. The process was anything but painless, however.
To start with, the design is a particularly tricky one to construct with CSS. And I was saddled with the requirement that the CSS template I produced had to appear nearly identical to the table based template. So there was that. But once I had created a CSS version that worked perfectly in Mozilla/Firefox/Safari/Opera/iCab/etc. - I started running into painfully stupid IE bugs. Bugs that came out of nowhere and seemed to have no rational cause or fix. So, I spent nearly 2 days hacking out workarounds for stupid IE CSS bugs.
I'm not one to go around bashing Microsoft; but it's times like this that their decision not release a standalone upgrade to IE looks that much more worse. If Longhorn isn't released until sometime in 2006, then the next version of IE won't have any sort of noticable market share until 2008 at the absolute earliest. That's four more years!! Four more years of stupid, asinine, please-would-you-fix-these-dumb-css-bugs IE 6 ... then again, four years is a long time. Who knows - maybe Firefox will start catching on in the mainstream and start stomping IE's butt. Then we can start complaining about stupid Firefox CSS bugs ;-)
