Where science and tech meet creativity.

I never cease to be amazed at the differences in website appearances from browser to browser. I’d come up with a web design I didn’t totally like, but I could live with, for Firefox and Safari. After getting some comments on its horribleness in Opera, I installed Opera and gasped – My left floating sidebar had forced my main content to the bottom of the page. Ugh! Tomorrow more website redesign chaos will be taking place. Sorry for the inconvenience.

So, I spent my morning working on the code for this site. At this stage there are two known bugs: 1) If my blog entry is too short the sidebars hang off the bottom of the main text area in an awkward, half-forgotten kind of way, and 2) in Opera the dates on the entries are a bit too high and overlap the header. My solution to the first problem is simple; I need to make sure my blog entries are long enough or at least have a really nice large picture to take up space. I don’t think anyone will complain about this solution. The answer to the second problem should be to fix it, but at this moment in time I can’t find a good cross browser solution. According to Google Analytics, only 2.4% of my traffic comes from Opera, so I’ve decided I’m going to live with the bad date layout until I’m done traveling this month.

What I’d like to understand is why the browsers can’t be compatible with basic codes like “float.” The main reasons to use different browsers is being attached to how the handle certain niceties like buttons, graphics, borders, and fonts. These built in structures should look a bit different. That said – those structures shouldn’t move. I suspect that one of the main reasons many websites look trashed in Opera is that is just doesn’t seem to handle css div constructions that float structures in a nested fashion.

As a MacIntosh using web designer, I am particularly annoyed with how M$ has created so many things that only work in its browser, and that their software creates sites that only look good in their software. In their latest round of “We’re going to cross are arms and refuse to work and play well with other operating systems,” they discontinued support for IE for OS X. I don’t even have the option of checking to see how this looks on IE unless I go borrow a PC. Let me repeat: Ugh!

But for now, welcome to the latest version of my website. I’m still not entirely  happy with how it looks (I need a logo for Star Stryder), but it as good as I feel like getting it today.