By Rick Lee
Hating Internet Explorer comes with the territory when dealing with the web, specifically IE6 and older. But is this “hate” really justified? Honestly… yes, but instead lets think of all the valuable lessons IE has forced us to learn based on some of my favorite bugs.
Why is my div pushed 100px right when I defined it at 50px?
There’s nothing like reasonless doubling of margins to force someone to look very closely at the box model and how it’s structured. One of the main reasons I started looking into the positioning of css elements was to solve this problem (Yes I know that’s not the way to fix it, but as a newbie it worked for me.).
Where’s the bottom of my floated element?
The “Guillotine Bug” is a great way to learn about why and where to clear your floats. “Float Theory” is such a huge part of modern web design, it makes me wish I ran into this bug earlier. Check out this article for more info.
No PNG Support?
Hard to see the pros in this one, but it inspired creativity for me. This marked the first time I used flash in a website for anything other than a fancy animated slideshow. Check out this site for a fun example how subtle uses of flash can be fun (Take a look at those bubbles coming out of the soda!).
Is it just me, or does the spacing look off?
In all fairness, this isn’t IE specific, but many browsers apply a default amount of margin, padding, line-height, etc to their elements. The best way to fight this is with a good ol’ global reset style sheet. Not only does it help with keeping the spacing consistent, but it saves a good amount of time in coding your css. Here’s ours.
IE has caused me headaches and countless hours of debugging, but I have to admit, I’m a better at xhtml/css because of it. So next time you have to debug a ridiculous problem in IE, just say
“thank you”.
Check out some more IE bugs here.
Or just forget IE all together.
Comments 1
I agree. I have learned more fighting ie6 than I would have ever learned if all browsers were equal.
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