IE6 was absolutely atrocious, standards-wise. There are (as I’ve already said once today) entire sites out there devoted to telling coders how to fix its mistakes. I haven’t used IE7 very much, mostly because I haven’t needed to see how things look in different browsers for a while, but I do know that they had the opportunity to fix a lot of the CSS problems in IE6 but instead left them in and just removed the fix for them. Thanks guys, much obliged.

My specific complain this time stems from the lack of pseudoclass recognition. For accessibility reasons, menus on sites should be unordered lists that you style to look nice: it’s how it’s done both on the main CIRRIE site and on the other conference site I’ve coded (though the latter is more obviously a list). Using display:inline you can also have a navbar at the top, like on my Baby Names project.

The problem is that adding brackets around each item looks nice but disrupts the natural flow of the words. It’s become my standard method but only because
the real way — #menu ul li:before {content:”["} #menu ul li:after {content:"]“} — doesn’t work in either modern version of Internet Explorer.

This was a rant, though not a particularly eloquent or timely one. It’s just damn frustrating when the developers of the most used browser seem insistent on ignoring the rules. (As an aside, the earlier blog post I linked to was also complaining about pseudoclasses; heh)

At first I thought it was an isolated thing, but an awful lot of groups out there seem content to make up a few letters and forget what they stand for (not that any library associations are guilty of that, mind you).