I was pretty proud of myself when I came up with the solution for the dropdown menus I use in the navigation bar in my current site design. They don’t require all of the cockamamie JavaScript most older solutions did. They surely don’t work in older browsers (I’m guessing), but that really doesn’t matter now. Most significantly to me, though, I had never seen a solution that worked like what I am doing.

I guess it was just a lack of looking. There’s even a term for this approach, Suckerfish Dropdowns, although I’m not doing exactly what they recommend as far as IE support is concerned. However, I haven’t actually noticed it being necessary. Read more »

Just when I needed it least, Internet Explorer has thrown me another curveball.

I’m hard at work trying to seem like less of a 20th Century web dinosaur by acquiring new skills with these techniques that are loosely lumped together into what some call “Web 2.0.” Key among these is an approach called AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). Fun stuff. I’ve been working for the past several days on an interactive registration form for a site at work, using AJAX. Of course, as usual, I’m plugging away in Safari and Firefox, but eventually I decided to check out how things are looking in Internet Explorer.

[When I figure out an emoticon that represents my head exploding, I'll insert it here.]

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Just a quick one, as I don’t have a lot of time to post… but of course, as usual, I had to make time for a detour into the madness of Internet Explorer when I discovered that my CSS line-height positioning was breaking when there was an inline image in the text. Why? Who knows? But the solution involved sticking vspace=”7″ into each offending image tag. Yet another case of hacking a one-off solution into the code to work around an Internet Explorer quirk. Almost as frustrating as IE’s violations of standards is the fact that there’s almost never a one-size-fits-all workaround!