I think that I’ve finally got my personal site and blog all formatted and integrated properly. No more duplicate or contradictory code, it validates as strictly standards compliant, and it looks the same in both IE and Mozilla.

But I had to laugh. I was up until very late last night (or very early this morning depending on how you look at it) getting it just right in Mozilla. When I got up and checked it in IE to see how it looked, I thought that maybe I’d have to tweak a couple of things. Well – all I saw was a couple of pixels. I spent the next 3 hours or so ripping things apart to identify the problem, then trying to reconstruct it all so that it worked properly in IE. (It turns out that IE doesn’t work properly with div height percentage statements, and overflow auto, if there is also no width definition for the div.) It also resulted not just in code changes, but also layout changes. In the end, I like it better than before so it was useful – even if extremely annoying.

In touching things up, I, again, discovered that IE was mangling things after I switched over to it once I was happy with Mozilla’s rendering. I had to spend a bit more time screwing around with some changes to correct those additional problems.

I have a feeling that I should just code and test in IE first – since it’s the most restrictive of the two – then check it in IE. What a pain.

On another humorous note, after I’d got my 2nd draft working in both IE and Mozilla, I asked Michelle to look at it from work, where she’s running IE 5. She called me almost right away to let me know that viewing it caused IE to crash and terminate. I couldn’t stop laughing for a good 10 minutes at the insanity of it all. While I’m not too concerned about IE 5 having problems, I do recognize that a fair number of people still use it so would like to solve it at some point down the road. (Only Microsoft would develop an application that can’t be installed twice, once for each version, thereby making any kind of browser version compatibility testing almost impossible.)