If you can’t read this, let me know

A persistent reader – oh, what the hell, it’s Mike O’Dell again, lord love him – informs me that on several browsers, this page – the one you’re reading – is a mess. It’s supposed to be a simple page with a white background and a three-column table in various shades of light yellowy-orangey-brown, reminiscent perhaps of a dusty popsicle left to melt on the dirty welcome mat of an adobe house. Something like that. Dark brown text. Red hyperlinks. That’s what it looks like in Dreamweaver where I design it, and that’s what it looks like in MS Internet Explorer. It is definitely not intended to be a blotch of blood red with text the same color but slightly more anemic.

But, while (according to Mike) Mozilla 5.0/0.9.4 does a good job, as does Galeon 0.12.1 which uses the same rendering enging, Netscape 4.7 seems to have an aesthetic sense that runs towards a far muddier mix. KDE Konquerer 2.1 (by far the most popular browser among Mongols) turns all hyperlinks invisible. Opera 5.0 doesn’t know when to end the red background of the headlines. Don’t you wish that by this point in the Web’s history we’d be past these incompatibilities? I know it will turn out to have been my fault, but it still stinks.

I’m not doing anything fancy here, folks, except using CSS. And I’m not going to stop, for declarative markup is a personal religion of mine. So, if you can’t read this, you have my deepest, most sincere-sounding apologies.

Categories: Uncategorized dw