Yeah, that’s what I (and a number of others out here in cyberspace) call Microsoft’s web browser. Not the Internet Explorer, but the Internet Exploder. Why, you ask? I’ll tell you why. I’ve been designing my next theme for the past two months. While my spare time is at a premium, I do have some and I enjoy the challenges brought on by trying to design a blog theme that I haven’t seen before. My problem is that the theme works perfectly in Firefox, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera and Amaya. Of these, Amaya is 100% W3C compliant. The rest are close, but not 100%. The problem is, while all these other browsers are W3C compliant, the Internet Exploder is not. As with most things, Microsoft has taken the W3C standard and done it’s typical “embrace and extend” and warped the standards. It has…. ahhh, never mind. I won’t get Microsoft to change its mind simply because I’m hollering here. They haven’t been compliant since Internet Exploder 1.0 and now at Internet Exploder 7.0 they STILL aren’t compliant. Anyway….
Going back to my original rant, in all the other browsers my new theme is working perfectly or with glitches so minor that it doesn’t affect the theme. In the Internet Exploder (versions 6 and 7) the theme doesn’t look or act anything like the other browsers. It goes off the width of the screen, it doesn’t lock certain elements in place on the screen so they are not scrollable, it doesn’t create the content area right, it doesn’t make the sidebar visible at all, and it doesn’t display transparent PNG files properly. What a rip. The problem is that a lot of the traffic that goes through my site is Internet Exploder. Using last month’s statistics I had 140,145 hits on my site. Of those, 30,722 were not generated by a bot of some sort (kind of depressing, huh? 78% of my hits are by bots…) Of the non-bot hits 16,284 (53%) were by Internet Exploder 6, Internet Exploder 7 and RSS readers that use IE. The other 14,438 hits (47%) were by compliant browsers, mostly Firefox and Mozilla. So if I use the theme I’ve been working on, I will immediately alienate over half of my visitors… and I don’t want to do that. So, I’ve got to keep plugging away at the theme and hopefully it will work out before summer. After all, it IS a spring theme.
