No man is an island

Just a short reminder mainly to myself how awkward IE is. I retouched a website for a customer today to make it fully working in IE. There were a few minor problems but nothing serious to get me to step in earlier.

So i went through my list of IE weirdness and discovered some things new to me:

• IE 6 cannot display borders with transparent as color. Now this was annoying since that meant to define a color in quite a few more spaces than necessary. Since the whole things i Zope/Plone backed i will collect all those colors in a DTML. Though Plone.org says this method is about to be deprecated i have yet to see what new way should be.
• IE 6 cannot display dotted borders. Yeah, thats right. It displays them as dashed. Workaround includes transparent gifs and a few css tricks so Mozilla or other browsers capable of displaying dotted borders don’t pick up the picture.
• IE 6 and 7 behave odd with fieldsets and legends. When you define a background color for a fieldset and that fieldset will contain a legend, the background color extends into the space above the fieldset itself to the upper border of the legend. This is definitely awkward, since the workaround really feels like fixing IE itself. The fix was basically to define fieldset position relative and legend position absolute and then move the legend to the right space again. This fix works only partially since a yet to be determined combination of margins, paddings and borders still lead to the background extending outside it’s borders.

Imagine you are a car manufacturer and you want your cars not only to outperform your competitor’s cars in technical performance but also in visual appeal. Of course you would hire a designer to do that. Any designer? No - you would hire a designer that not only is a good designer but one that also knows about aerodynamics and the technical limitations like how much space does the motor take up.

Same game, different results with web designers. Every designer i worked with to create a website had no idea what designing for the web is about (one noticeable exception, who happens to be an ex-flatmate and a very good friend). All of them simply replied with “simply cut it out” or “pick the color from the photoshop file” when confronted with questions about how to get all the info needed to implement the design in html. (more…)