If you are one of the few people who visits this site on a semi-regular basis, you may have noticed I recently changed the appearance of my little home here on the Internets. The change involved some minor tweaking to the site’s CSS file, along with some uploading of a few new images. Because the tweaking was so minor, it didn’t occur to me to go through the whole rigmarole of cross-platform testing the updated site.

Imagine my surprise, then, when, on a whim, I visited the site last evening via Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 web browser, only to find that things looked like hammered ass.

There are a few lessons to be learned here for the average reader, as well as for the budding web designers/developers out there.

Average reader:

Are you using Mac or Windows? If the latter, let me implore you to switch to the former.

Now, whether you’re on a Mac or using Windows, the next question is: are you using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser? Well, c’mere, I wanna tell you a little secret. Lean in. Closer. A little closer. Good. OK, now, here’s the deal: MICROSOFT’S INTERNET EXPLORER WEB BROWSER BLOWS GOATS!

(Moreover, Microsoft stopped supporting its Mac IE browser years ago, so if you’re a Mac user still using IE, you are likely seeing a web that appears to have been run through a meat grinder on its way to your monitor.)

Both Mac and Windows users: I assure you, you will have a better browsing experience if you switch to a better browser.

One of the best and most widely used IE alternatives is Firefox. You really should go get it. Please. I’m begging you.

Windows users, if you just can’t break free of Bill Gates’ Jedi mind trick, at least download and install Microsoft’s new version of Internet Explorer, IE7. It is more standards compliant than its predecessors.

Mac users, you may also want to try Safari (an Apple-native browser that many Mac users prefer over all others) or Camino.

Budding web designers/developers out there:

Are you employing web standards in the construction of your websites? If not, you should. A great starting point for learning how to do so is this book.

Let me also recommend that, should you (wisely) begin your journey down the path of web standards, make it your aim to no longer use tables for your site layout. While this might feel alien at first, you will find that it is actually much, much easier to position things with CSS than with tables.

Another benefit of using standards is that doing so allows you to then use the World Wide Web Consortium’s HTML and CSS validators to check your code. I did just that earlier today when I was unable to figure out what was causing my site to look so god-awful in Explorer. The HTML passed; the CSS didn’t. The errors that the validator returned looked like valid CSS to me, so I was further perplexed. What I subsequently figured out was that, when originally building the site, I must have copied and pasted into the CSS file the portions of CSS code that were getting flagged, and, when I did so, the clipboard apparently included some invisible characters that caused Explorer to choke on the CSS. Re-typing the error-generating CSS strings from scratch directly in the CSS file eliminated the invisible characters and thereby fixed the problem.

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Alrighty, then. I think this joint is back to looking like it should on both the Mac and Windows operating systems. Sorry for the blunder.

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