Woo!

Throughout this I've never claimed to be a web designer or even that technical. I know how to create useable sites, and sites which fulfil marketing needs, but in terms of PHP or CSS hacks or anything like that I knew I might have to learn a bit.

Well, I've already learnt a fair amount about PHP this week. And tonight I've been playing with some CSS things in order to get stuff to work how I want it to.

The thing is, in Firefox everything I was doing displayed fine. Firefox is CSS 2.0 compliant. Or at least a damn sight more so than current IE browsers. So while I'm trying to build a compliant site (for the sake of future-proofing, accessibility, and - although I intend to test it - so I have a fairly good idea how it'll behave in compliant browsers) I, like many web developers, am struggling with the barriers IE puts in the way.

Of course, IE has the biggest market share and it seems there's little we can do about this. While I'm a big fan of Firefox (regardless of security issues, it's just nicer to use) I'm not going to be stupid about this and just say "well, if IE looks wrong that's their problem", or - conversely - just work to IE. It's a good learning and problem solving exercise to get stuff cross-browser compatible. And it makes business sense.

Still - there's good news. Microsoft are catching up with the really useful, really powerful stuff the open source people have been evangelising about for ages. Not only do I hear that Vista (the next Windows version) will have RSS support, but apparently IE7 will fix a lot of CSS bugs. Hurrah! Microsoft *aren't* evil. They waver around that difficult line of comprimise between technical people and everyday users and they're obviously never going to satisfy everyone. But they're working on it.

Now, let's see what the damn thing looks like in Opera set to text browser emulation...

*EDIT*

It works in Opera. Looks jolly odd with structural elements showing, but that's no surprise...