Rubenerd

It used to be that you’d develop a site to work the way you want, then you’d load it in Internet Explorer and spend the rest of your development time fixing all the differences.

I’ll admit, this is the first time I’ve deployed a rewritten site without testing it in IE first. If it were for a client it’d be another story, but for my personal site it’s got to the stage where it doesn’t bother me as much any more.

This evening, I had a few hours at UTS, and decided to use one of the Windows lab computers to test my site here in Internet Explorer. The lab machines run Windows 7 with Windows Internet Explorer 9; not the latest version but I was hoping it’d treat me kindly. I loaded the page, gritted my teeth and crossed my fingers.

Micraculously, the page looked and worked surprisingly well. During the time I stopped using Windows in any production capacity, IE seems to have improved a great deal.

Of course, there were still a few outliers:

• Images in anchors still display a thick, ugly border around them. One of the first things I used to do when writing CSS would be to set the border width to 0 for images in anchors, and looks as though I’ll still have to do so.

• Some scaled images I set up to look good on Apple’s Retina displays look blockly and pixellated. This is unfortunate; I’ll have to figure out another way to do this.

• The placeholder attribute for the Search box didn’t display anything. Fortunately, I was prepared for this, so the IE inline HTML comment if statement with a “Search:” label appeared.

• The text was thin and pixellated, though that’s more of an issue with how Windows renders fonts.

Internet Explorer 10 might resolve some of these issues further. For now, I’ll just write a small IE specific CSS file and fix these bugs. TL;DR I’m cautiously impressed with how it turned out.