Ouch! My widdle head!
06/21/06 12:39 AM
Today I was shanghai'd at work by an old customer, a
printing company that took all their DTP in-house
years ago. We don't do much for them anymore except
exchange professional courtesies. This week their
typesetter guy is on vacation so they asked if I'd
stop by and make some changes on a few jobs they had
in the works. No problem, swing by & bill the
hour or two. Sure. Well, that turned into an all day
fiasco running between my office and theirs trying to
do two full time jobs at once. Rotten! Anyway, they
have jobs set up on both a Mac and a Windows machine.
While I was waiting for something to print I thought
I'd log into this site to see what she looks like
with good ol' Microsoft Internet Explorer in Windows
XP.
Poop. Looks like poop. See, the navigation bar across the top isn't actually supposed to be black- it's transparent. But I guess IE does not support transparency like just about every other browser out there. And the bar is not supposed to be so tall, so in IE it extends too low on the page an crushes my baby head. Also, it should float independent of page scrolling, but in IE it is anchored at the top. Plus there's the fact that Windows doesn't anti-alias type, so all the letterforms look inherently blocky and ugly, so that's always a shock to my (admittedly Mac-centric) aesthetic sensibilities.
When I got back to my office I checked it again on one of the XP machines. Terrible! I'm embarrassed. But then I downloaded a fresh copy of Firefox to that machine, and outside of the no-anti-aliasing issue the site looked just fine. So what do I do? I know that many people who check me out are probably still using IE and seeing an ugly (to me) website. But everyone else sees it as it is supposed to look. Do I change my new theme to something that I don't like as much, but will appear "correctly" to Windows Explorer users?
HA HA that is a funny question. HA HA! Stop using Explorer everyone! STOP. If it were a decent browser I could see why maybe someone would put up with all the gigantic computer devouring security flaws in it, but it has got to be the worst browser available. I know I'm not the only person who thinks this. Deep down, you know it too. Now's the time people! I want to give you something. The Gift of the Internet as it Should Be. No need to thank me, this was yours all along.
Well, okay, you can thank me. But no tongue this time.
For reference, here's what the site is intended to look like. For the record, I mostly use Safari. Sometimes Firefox, which I suspect might be a little better, but the difference is marginal. I don't mean this post to sound like some anti-Windows snobbery. I'm just disappointed that I work to make something look a certain way and not everyone can see it. That's sucko, Johnny. Big sucko.
Poop. Looks like poop. See, the navigation bar across the top isn't actually supposed to be black- it's transparent. But I guess IE does not support transparency like just about every other browser out there. And the bar is not supposed to be so tall, so in IE it extends too low on the page an crushes my baby head. Also, it should float independent of page scrolling, but in IE it is anchored at the top. Plus there's the fact that Windows doesn't anti-alias type, so all the letterforms look inherently blocky and ugly, so that's always a shock to my (admittedly Mac-centric) aesthetic sensibilities.
When I got back to my office I checked it again on one of the XP machines. Terrible! I'm embarrassed. But then I downloaded a fresh copy of Firefox to that machine, and outside of the no-anti-aliasing issue the site looked just fine. So what do I do? I know that many people who check me out are probably still using IE and seeing an ugly (to me) website. But everyone else sees it as it is supposed to look. Do I change my new theme to something that I don't like as much, but will appear "correctly" to Windows Explorer users?
HA HA that is a funny question. HA HA! Stop using Explorer everyone! STOP. If it were a decent browser I could see why maybe someone would put up with all the gigantic computer devouring security flaws in it, but it has got to be the worst browser available. I know I'm not the only person who thinks this. Deep down, you know it too. Now's the time people! I want to give you something. The Gift of the Internet as it Should Be. No need to thank me, this was yours all along.
Well, okay, you can thank me. But no tongue this time.
For reference, here's what the site is intended to look like. For the record, I mostly use Safari. Sometimes Firefox, which I suspect might be a little better, but the difference is marginal. I don't mean this post to sound like some anti-Windows snobbery. I'm just disappointed that I work to make something look a certain way and not everyone can see it. That's sucko, Johnny. Big sucko.
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