The new site makes me very happy. I’ve been tinkering with it nonstop since I decided to make the changeover, and especially now that the changeover is official. There is one issue that will affect only a small portion of my readership, and that is because they are still using Internet Explorer to browse the web.
Now, I can’t tell you what browser to use (but shame on you if you’re still sailing the Intarwebs on that leaky tub IE), but I can tell you that at this point DmentD.com may never be optimized to work perfectly in IE… and here’s why: Microsoft has deemed it unnecessary to bother conforming to the ever changing world of web design standards and conventions. MS picks and chooses what it feels is optimal to them, makes up a fair amount of their own shit, and discards the rest.
The case in question here has to do with integrating my gallery into the WordPress front end here. The gallery is optimally viewed in an environment that favors a landscape page design, whereas I utilize a portrait page design that employs tightly controlled design elements. In FireFox, and indeed on the other non-IE browsers I’ve tested the site on (including, I would like to add, an iPhone), the gallery merely extends gracefully past the confines of the right border of the page design as needed because that content is”floating” above the page design itself. IE, however, triggers a “float drop” (a phrase coined specifically for this little anomaly), causing the gallery to appear below the navigation bar because it is wider — by narrow and wide degrees — than the space allotted for it.
There are workarounds (not solutions, mind you, but the equivalent of using a coat hanger to keep your muffler from dragging the ground as you drive), but none of them are readily applicable to this situation. I s’pose I could find or build another theme that is laid out better for these circumstances, but I like the one I’m using, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time making it pleasing to me, and to selectively quote GonzO:
“I found out that I don’t really care, on a personal-site level, about standards, language validation, or other such nonsense. I care about people reading what they came to read, not using excessive amounts of bandwidth, and being able to use the entire site. This should happen across any platform, and on any browser, you can think of, though I no longer test in IE or even in Windows for that matter. The site will not fit if you’re using anything less than 1024×768, so sorry to all the dudes out there still using a 4mb video card, but COME ON and get with the program, already.”
So, I apologize to the IE users, you’re just gonna have to scroll down a bit more than everyone else. I’ve got more important site tasks to work out than fixing the gallery display in one browser, only to have it broken in another, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum. If you’re particularly upset about this, you can always just bookmark the direct link to the gallery and use that.
And having blathered on about all that, I also want to point out that I am still working on the backlog of fixing broken links and images in the remaining posts, and assigning them to appropriate categories.