In my previous post I stated that for the Fall Reboot I was completely redesigning my site.  This included building a new CSS file from scratch that will help to determine the layout, colors, and overall theme of my site.  Let me tell you right now that building a site completely off CSS is a pain in the ass.

It's not really the CSS coding that's hard or anything, or that it's a poorly designed coding language.  Far from it.  Instead it's the multitude of browsers that like to completely ignore the CSS coding or do their own little unique deciphering of the language and how it should be displayed.

So what the hell am I talking about?  I'm just kind of upset right now.  On my home computer where I do all my web design and coding I have three different browsers.  I have Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), Firefox, and Opera.  I prefer to use IE7 for my daily use because it seems more streamlined inside the Windows OS.  But I keep Firefox and Opera around mainly for testing purposes to see what my web site will look like in them.  Most of the time it's good.  Microsoft finally did some good with IE7 and it now handles CSS coding a hell of a lot better than previous versions.  So while at home (last night) I'll spend some time working on my site (4+ hours) and it'll look great in all three of my browsers.  But then I'll go somewhere else (work) and use a different browser (IE6) to check out my site....

Craptasitc.  My site looks completely horrible in IE6 and I'm sure it looks even worse in older IE and Netscape versions.  I know CSS is still a relatively new web standard but big name browsers like IE6 should have no problem displaying CSS.  Now I get to go back into my CSS file and try to tweak and hack it to get it to work with these browsers.  It's a pain in the ass.  I'm sure I'll fix it eventually, but then that will probably cause it to break in another browser.  It's an ongoing battle.

But until then, if you're viewing my site (or any web site) I highly recommend you use either Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox.