How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love I.E.

Khoi

19 years ago

Users viewing Subtraction.com with Internet Explorer will now see a notice just above the navigation that says, effectively, that that browser won’t “display this site quite as it was intended.” This is obnoxious, I know, but when I made a game plan to produce this redesign, I deliberately chose not to take too seriously the way it would look in Microsoft’s still-dominant Web browser.

This is partly because it’s loads easier to design for modern browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera and OmniWeb, and with so little time with which to make the redesign a reality, I decided to save myself an additional 20% heartache and pretty much ignore IE.

Below: Your browser blows. I mean, er, there are some slight deficiencies in Internet Explorer that prevent it from displaying this site just right. Just a bit.

Relax, Don’t Do It

For Internet Explorer 5.0 — which, really, should be considered a relic of history — this is kind of a deal-breaker, as even the navigation won’t show up. This is a nontrivial a problem, I admit. I hope one day to repair that, but I kind of doubt if that day will come soon. For the vast majority of IE users, you should still be able to view all the pages with a reasonable amount of fidelity, but there are some finer details of the layout that are amiss. For instance, IE renders a superfluous and completely inappropriate indentation in the first paragraph of most bodies of text. It drives me absolutely crazy when I think about it, but I decided I’m just not going to think about it.

In the past, I would have spent a lot of time trying to finesse these details back into proper rendering, tweaking the XHTML and CSS repeatedly while gnashing my teeth. But that’s just not something I’m interested in doing any longer, especially having been doing this site for so long and for free. Now approaching my mid-thirties, there’t just no reason to inflict that kind of frustrating, time-consuming expectation for thorougness on myself any longer. It’s just not fun to deal with Internet Explorer, and I want to keep this fun.