Introducing Bespin from Dion Almaer on Vimeo.

Did they say this project was started by someone named Russ Bespin? Who is this guy? Either that is a fake name to help fend off George Lucas’s copyright lawyers, or this guy was destined to work in cloud computing. Regardless, I can’t wait to see what the crew at Mozilla can do with a project like this. I played around with it a bit and even in its Alpha stage it’s pretty functional. It’s also the first time I’ve seen the <canvas> tag used for anything useful. Check it out here.

This is a great write-up by Swedish blogger Roger Johansson. From my experiences over the last month, I would say he hit the hammer right on the head. This is what he had to say:

1. Sites that have an XML declaration before the DOCTYPE, making IE 6 use quirks mode, but not IE 7. Both browsers still get the same CSS, so IE 7 renders it differently.
2. Sites that depend heavily on CSS hacks that no longer work in IE 7.
3. Sites that use conditional comments to feed a bugfix stylesheet to IE without specifying a version number, thereby making IE 7 load the bugfixes and mess up rendering.


<!--[if IE 7]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../wp-content/themes/skyecade/ie7_hacks.css" />
< ![endif]-->


It sucks that I had to do it this way. I was warned by multiple web developers that this is not the preferred method and I completely to agree with them. For now though, the site works in IE7 and it will buy me some time until I can really look over the code and see what, if anything, is causing this stupid, annoying, pain in my ass behavior. It should be fun.

This site uses a lot of CSS and is written in xhtml (transitional), both of which comply with w3c standards. Validate them yourselves if you wish. BUT WAIT! Before you do, I should mention that though the site code complies with w3c standards, some of the content may not always validate properly, e.g., when embedding videos from Youtube. So to validate this site, click on this to leave the front page and then click on the two buttons below.

   &   

Needless to say, the site renders perfectly when using Firefox, Opera, Netscape, Safari, Konqueror, and even older versions of Internet Explorer. Grrrr. I’m so disappointed. I was really looking forward to this release.

So what now? I could block all IE7 users from my site. That’s just mean. Not to mention that in about one months time IE7 is going to be included in Microsoft’s automatic updates – which in turn, means that the majority of Window’s user’s will be upgrading to IE7. That’s a little under 50% of my visitors. Yeah, I thought that was a crazy statistic too. That obviously means that about half of the people that visit this site are using something other than Internet Explorer. Although, I’ve always assumed that people who read and/or write blogs were more likely to use an alternative browser to Internet Explorer, but I never would have guessed 50%. My faith in humanity has just doubled.

Maybe I should just wait for Microsoft to fix this problem for me. (you may now take a moment to laugh). Done?

No, I think my only viable option here is to find a CSS expert who can write me an IE7 hack of some type. If it’s even possible. I really don’t want to do a complete site redesign just because of one stupid company that can’t play nice with the rest of the kids in the yard.

To help clarify my last statement:

• kids = web standards
• yard = the internet
• stupid = Microsoft

Alright, I don’t think Microsoft is stupid. In fact, I think they can be down right brilliant at times. So why, then, can’t they get something as simple as this correct? Why, oh why.

Anyways, I don’t plan on doing anything drastic for a while. Maybe Bill Gates is a frequent reader of my site and will be appalled with what he sees and go back to Redmond and personally fix the problem himself. Thanks Bill! I owe you one.

Enough blabbering. What is the moral of this story ladies and gentlemen? For the love of god, download Firefox.

<!- - end IE7 hack - ->

BTW, here is the artist’s step by step instructions on how he created this in Photoshop CS2. Pretty impressive stuff.