Internet Explorer and the Great Beyond
I used most of the time I was going to spend working on the layout and content of this site today working on the new design for Wander Lust Records. Although my friend Dave is technically the webmaster, when he volunteered for the job he knew practically nothing about HTML and asked me for help. Throughout the year and a half or so I’ve done pretty much nothing on that front, so last week I showed him a little of the CSS I’ve been learning and then realized he could be much better served by using WordPress for his news page.
I also realized that I could learn WordPress by messing with his site, then use what I knew for my own. The problem with my web efforts is that historically I want to do things but have nothing to put up. Dave is always the visionary in our team, while I take on the practical matters of getting it done, so it was a good match.
As I explained CSS to him, I came to a point where I needed to use the * html hack for Internet Explorer (I’d like to link to an explanation of exactly what this is, but just try searching Google for “* html” and see what kind of results you get). I used a diagram of the Box model and finally got to that mythical box outside of the html tag. What follows is our conversation:
Dan: But Internet Explorer, it has this box outside the html box. It doesn’t have a name… it’s just something.
Dave: …What?
Dan: IE believes in this higher power, outside what we know. It doesn’t have a name, we can’t see it, but IE has faith it’s there.
(pause)
Dan: Internet Explorer believes in God.
Then today we were looking at a problem where the sidebar had white above it in IE but not in Firefox. I noticed I had put a margin-top on everything, then used :first-child {margin-top:0} to take it away on the first list. It turns out I didn’t need a top margin (it actually gave too much whitespace), but I realized the problem lay in IE6’s refusal to recognize pseudoclasses that aren’t a:hover. As I explained to him:
Dan: I took out the top margin in the first child, but IE doesn’t recognize the first-child pseudoclass.
Dave: I see. So it knows there’s a God, but it doesn’t recognize its children.