emotionalmarkup

Well, initially this blog was set up as a vehicle for my work, research and writing but the inevitable design, development and deployment phase is just too saucy not to write about.

You know how it is: you want to create your own site and throw in as many chips, dips, chains and whips as possible, thinking that the more features you have, the more interesting it will be. See you next century, pal! Unless you don’t have a girlfriend nor a job to take up your time, nothing will get done, least of all your primary objective: getting a site up and running, so that you may blog away until you run out of complaints, and hate and any other emotion that propelled you into web publishing.

Finally having realised this, I’ve consigned an ever-augmenting list of idea and features to the freezer and have decided to create a simple design with simple needs. Thawable material will be selected when time permits.

I’ve also decided not to support some js and css features for ie6. By that I mean I’m not going to bother hacking around for ie6. Not because I’m lazy - well this is partly the cause - but because I loathe ie6. My motives are driven by pure, white-hot contempt. I’ve wasted what perhaps amounts to months of my life battling against ie6’s stubbornness and pure non-standards drivel. Some of my encounters, on which I hope to elaborate in future postings include:

• ie6’s utter disregard for multple class inheritance: think something like label.email.active is going to override label.name.active? Think again oh pitiful web developer! ie6 will pick up on the last declaration of label.xxxx.error and apply that to all! Yay!
• ie6’s box-model insanity and ignorance of png love. This is old news, let’s move on.

It crazy that, what is by common standards, an ancient browser is still holds market dominance. However on that note, I read an interesting development technique by Brian Suda that propounds that you could, if you wanted to, develop your CSS for the lesser browsers (read ie6) first and then through CSS3 override your rules to bring it up to standard. Great idea and merry way to avoid some hacks.