Keys Corner

I have changed the template used for this site over the last week. And I have decided that I have spent enough of my life fiddling around with all sorts of hacks to fix the appearance of sites I have produced so that they appear correctly in Microsoft’s web browser.

All versions of Internet Explorer prior to version 8 are extraordinarily poorly programmed. They wrongly calculate border widths of elements that make up a typical website and put background images in the wrong place. Web site development is a hobby for me, not a full time job, and because I don’t work every day with tricks needed to make MS IE behave, I end up spending at least half of the total time I need to develop a site fiddling around making Internet Explorer display it correctly:

Messed up by MS IE
As things should look

Not any more.

If you use MS IE 6.0 or earlier to view this site, the site header is not displayed correctly, and you will see a message telling you that you are using a older browser and suggesting you install one of a number of browsers that work correctly.

To selectively display the warning message for all versions of MS IE less than or equal (“lte” in the tag below) to version 6, I inserted it between a couple of tags which only MS IE understands:

Useful information on this technique can be found on The Web Squeeze (2 pages) and Velvet Blues.

I have switched from using a WordPress template that I developed myself over several iterations, to one based heavily on the Thematic Framework, developed by Ian Stewart. which is very elegantly structured and includes several innovations over the standard WordPress templates. I should add, that the problems in the header area are caused by my hacking Ian’s template to meet my requirements, and are not present in the original version!

For example, Ian allows you to insert widgets in several places in the pages where WordPress does not. This is, in fact, how I inserted the warning about MS IE – I published it using a text widget that positioned it at the top of the main page and (in case people link to a specific posting from Google) at the top of the single posting page. These are positions that you can not normally publish to in the standard templates.