IE support – criticism

The point is, though, that the bugs are within IE because it does not display some things per Web standards. Thus, you can code for a buggy browser — that is, code for Microsoft, and hope that Microsoft never corrects its browser bugs — or you can code correctly and then apply hacks that only affect IE. Your choice, but it pays to understand *what* is buggy.

(Oops; the last three posts were made before I posted mine.)

An example for DianeV’s post:

You’re filming a movie. Audience A knows proper English, and Audience B knows some malformed/chopped-up mess of the English language, and a little bit of proper English.

Do you film the movie using proper English for the dialogue, or do you use some malformed/chopped-up mess of the English language for the dialogue. Now, I know that the latter has been done, but the former (film the movie using proper English) has always been preferred.

You can’t film the movie for Audience B, because Audience A will not be able to understand the dialogue. If you film the movie for Audience A, at least Audience B stands a chance of understanding the dialogue.

?? Fortunately, it’s possible to code CSS properly and then apply IE-only hacks to get a layout that displays the same, or pretty much the same, in all modern browsers.

But as long as that is “accepted”, M$ will continue to force things to be adapted for them. That cost $$ in productivity, if nothing else.
Not to mention, it totally creates a much steeper learning curve. That can be evident from the multitude of posts seen here everyday, including the OP.

Firefox is hardly for just for “techno people”. I recommend it to everyone and I have got a number of people who are anything but techno using – they all prefer it to IE. I have had the same experience with Opera. Most often I have installed a decent browser for them in the office, and, once they saw what it could do, they installed it forthemselves at home.

I agree themes do need to work with IE given its market share. However admin themes are a bit different – you are going to be using your blog regularly, aren’t you? so why not spend 5 minutes installing the best client software for its admin interface?

In any case if you use the net enough to have a blog, then you probably should get a decent browser. I had to use a PC with only IE on it yesterday, and it felt very primitive by comparison to Firefox or Opera – the experience was closer to using a browser in 1996 than my daily experience today. No Live bookmarks, no Flash blocking, no search box or search shortcuts, no tabs, no spellchecker, no pop-up blocking etc.

FWIW, I am a fringe techno person. I did dowload Firefox to use with WP and other things, and I’ve used it before on a 98 machine when IE simply would not go for more than 5 minutes without crashing. But I don’t want my blog to only look good for technically savvy people. It’s not a computer related site. My wife, for example, would never even know about anything but IE, since it came on the computer. I don’t know Firefox’s numbers, but last I checked my logs (for another non-computer oriented site) I think IE was over 80%.

I didn’t mean to start a discussion of the merits of IE. I just think that any respectable package ought to work properly with it given the market share. Can you imagine paying money for some hosted blog service, having the layout be half garbled under IE and then getting lectured about standards when you requested tech support? That’s my experience here, mostly, minus the paying part, of course ;).

If someone didn’t have web programming experience and asked me about WP, I’d say to just forget it I think. I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking and it’s still not right in IE. I’m not sure what package is out there that “just works” and allows modest customization (like changing the colors).

Again, don’t get the impression that I’m angry. For the most part I’m happy with WP and really appreciate the work that I’m parasiting for free! I just would have been happier if it were a little more polished feeling, and the anti-IE thing is just frustrating because sites need to work under IE or you lose 70%+ of your readers.

And yes, you can go add whatever bulleting you want, VERY EASILY, in the CSS for the theme. And there’s NO reason whatsoever to go creating a transparent-gif bullet — there’s something like a dozen bullet options that should be respectable.

If it’s very easy to fix, then why doesn’t someone associated with WP just fix it? It’s NOT very easy for me, obviously, since I’ve wasted a lot of time trying the various hacks people have suggested on this forum. At the least I kind of expected an article or official post about making the default theme look right in IE.

Anyway, if it’s very easy, then please tell me what to change to get the small >> bullets as intended by the designer. ??

(no preview on this forum? I’m not sure if I’m quoting properly)

I don’t get where you are coming from mastiff “get someone from WP to fix it”. You are the only one who thinks its “broken”. If you have a question about CSS, then ask a question about CSS. But don’t blame the hammer because you can’t drive a nail straight.

I think it would be the wrong way to make HTML output compliant to a specific browser. For this reason the W3C has developed standards: HTML, CSS etc. As far as I can see WP and its themes are compliant to these standards. If your browser can’t display WP output correctly, your browser isn’t standard compliant and you should think about switching to a compliant one, as long as your preferred software producer can provide a standard compliant browser.

I wouldn’t criticise the WP team for having troubles with the CSS in IE. It does take a long, long time to learn all the caveats of coding for it. Still, I manage my way around it and if I find a spare moment, I’d be happy to supply fixes (that is, conditional hacks) to make the pages render properly in IE without affecting other browsers.

Sure, it may make the CSS not “perfect”, but it would then render perfectly in IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera or any other generally supported browser. Is that not a good thing?

Hm. Guess people are finally finding out that IE in fact doesn’t work. I guess you wouldn’t expect instructions for take-off in a car, either. So why expect instructions on how to make something standards-compliant look right in IE? I think you should install Firefox (or Opera) for your wife, by the way. I wouldn’t let my wife surf with IE/Win ??

I don’t get where you are coming from mastiff “get someone from WP to fix it”. You are the only one who thinks its “broken”. If you have a question about CSS, then ask a question about CSS. But don’t blame the hammer because you can’t drive a nail straight.

??? Search on “bullets for IE” or something similar and you’ll see that everyone acknowledges that the default theme does not display bullets under IE. Other posts have also acknowledged the text box layout problems in the theme editor. I’m not doing anything wrong because I haven’t done anything. I’m using the default theme.

I’ll say it again. MOST people use IE. A good web application needs to work with it. Saying IE is not standards compliant doesn’t help anyone, since most readers will still be using it. If I go to a site using IE and it looks garbled up, I just assume the web designer is an ameteur. Think you could code for E-bay or Amazon and just tell your boss that IE users don’t matter because they should use a “real” browser?

Oh, and I do have a CSS question. What do I change to show the default theme sidebar bullets under Firefox and IE?

Change this:
.entry ul li:before, #sidebar ul ul li:before {
content: “0BB 020”;
/* content: url(‘https://www.unallied.com/wp-content/themes/unallied/images/bullet.GIF’); */
}

to this:
.entry ul li, #sidebar ul ul li {
list-style:circle;
}

Change the circle to anything from this list:
https://www.w3schools.com/css/pr_list-style-type.asp

Unless you want an image…..