IE Sucks (or I do)

by Christopher Paul on August 2, 2006

I just noticed that the site doesn’t work correctly in Internet Explorer; the sidebar is missing. I don’t even know how long ago that happened let alone what caused it because I haven’t used IE since Firefox came out as a 1.0. Hell, since I switched to Ubuntu, I don’t even use Windows. I was told that it doesn’t work in IE by someone who is forced into it by policy of the company he works for (Thanks for the tip Michael!).

So I apologize to all the IE users out there. While I encourage you to install Firefox, Flock, or Opera, I don’t want to alienate you IE guys (and gals). But rest assured, I will find out what I did to cause IE to conveniently omit the sidebar. The funny thing about development of any kind is that one typo can cause the entire application to crash and burn miserably. IE seems to be picking up my typo perfectly (probably the only thing it does right).

I don’t know why the Mozilla’s Gecko and Opera’s Presto layout engines handle the exception and not IE. IE’s Trident just doesn’t like it. I’m hoping it’s fixed in IE7 but even then, I don’t know if I really want bad code on my site. I looked at the XHTML validator and found lots of errors but I don’t understand what it is they say is wrong with the code to fix it. But whatever I did can’t be that great of a mistake because the other browsers handled it.

If anyone out there knows what I’m doing wrong, I’d appreciate the feedback and educate me on how not to have it happen again.

UPDATE: I found out why. Two posts had metadata and formating from OpenOffice in them that broke the layout. Chalk it up to me trying spellcheck with WordPress. I still don’t know why IE had a fit with it but after removing the metadata, IE renders the page layout just fine. Sorry IE users.

Previous post:

Next post: