If you’ve visited this site in the last few days, you may have seen it’s transformation to a new look, or, if you use Internet Explorer, you may have just seen a complete mess. To those of you who fall in the latter group, I offer my apologies, as well as my condolences for not yet having discovered Firefox. Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to sell you on Firefox, there are more than enough articles on the web already about that.

The point is, I’ve used Firefox as my preferred browser for a long time, and now it’s really my only option since I don’t use Windows anymore. So, when I’m designing my web sites, I make it work in Firefox, and hope it works in IE. It used to be that was a fairly reliable strategy, since Firefox is (or was) generally more strict than IE. The problem is, Firefox is strict, and follows the standards, (that’s my interpretation – others may argue) which means it’s now very easy to accomplish some things in Firefox with a few lines of style definitions, that turn out to be – well – impossible in IE. Like this layout, for example.

It’s not like I was trying to accomplish anything radical. This is, after all, essentially what’s called a "three column" layout, which is what a large majority of web sites use. Now, before you accuse me of having no imagination, there’s a reason why so many web sites use this layout: it just makes sense. It’s just the simplest way to organize navigation, content and advertising, etc.

I’ve used this kind of layout many times before, on most of my web sites. So why did I run into trouble? Well, it’s quite simple really. All I wanted to do was put the content on the left instead of the in the middle. Simple, right? Well, in Firefox it was, but in IE I never could get it to work. I finally realized I was spending far too much time trying to get this to work… and fudged it.

Now, back to what really makes these sites work: It’s the content, stupid.

Posted by michael under Guide Updates
Tags: Technology
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