I Hate Internet Explorer

UPDATE: I can no longer run an emulator on my Mac and so can not test Windows browsers. Testing a couple dozen browsers is a waste of time, since all but MSIE work as expected. Therefore, I am not going to maintain this page by updating the screenshots, but I will leave it as an archival testament to the deficiency of Internet Explorer. I will continue to code to standards, as I always have, and test my pages with an assortment of Macintosh browsers, plus Lynx. Ted may test with IE if he chooses.

Hi, Keshet here. I am the one responsible for coding the Scientology Racism pages. Although I am not a web expert, I do know HTML quite well and am proficient with CSS. I do my best to apply good coding principles and to adhere to web standards so that my pages will display as expected in a wide variety of browsers. I work on a Macintosh, on which I run a Windows XP emulator. I test my pages in several ways and in many browsers.

To start, I hand-code my pages in BBEdit [offsite], a text editor with many coding features but most pertinently, a built-in HTML syntax checker that I use as I finish creating or editing each page. To check my CSS and double-check my HTML, I use the (Macintosh-only) browser, iCab [offsite], with its built-in validators. I have a standalone version of the W3C's HTML validator [offsite] that I use to check my pages before uploading, and both Ted and I randomly check pages online with that and the W3C's CSS validator [offsite]. I can assure you that my code is valid and correct, and if you View Page Source, you'll see it's also neat and well structured.

I use multiple browsers to view my pages (see below) to make sure they display correctly, but there are limitations. For instance, I may test with Opera 9.23 but not Opera 7 because I don't have copies of all versions of all browsers (I usually have just the more recent ones); Windows doesn't like to install two different versions of a browser (though there is a way to do this, I haven't gotten around to trying it) so I test with IE 7.0 but not 6.0 or 5.5. I also use Browsershots [offsite], which provides snapshots of a page as it appears in the browser(s) of choice. Great service, but not flexible enough for thorough testing without overloading them with requests.

My pages look good and behave as expected in all browsers—even as text-only with no styling—except Amaya, SlimBrowser, and Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows. Amaya is the W3C's "complete web browsing and authoring environment" whose support for CSS is "not yet complete". I've never seen it in my site's logs so I'm not going to worry about it for the moment. SlimBrowser is a stripped-down version of MSIE so of course it renders my pages exactly like its big brother. Even the very old Macintosh version of MSIE, discontinued in 2003, works pretty well—because it was developed from the ground up for the Mac and is not a port of the Windows version.

[Editorial]

Every time I change the design of Scientology Racism, I spend an inordinate amount of time tracking down MSIE bugs and trying to fix my code so it works with MSIE, doesn't screw up other browsers, and is still valid. Frankly, I'm tired of it. I can't believe that in all of the huge world of Microsoft, they can't find a CSS expert or follow standards. But the problem is deeper than that. So many pages (major corporations, banks, news sites, social and blog sites, etc.) have been coded specifically for MSIE that if Microsoft ever fixed it, all those sites would break. As long as Microsoft is the 800-pound gorilla on the web, it can continue to produce crappy software and expect people to accommodate it. Not me, not any more. I hate Internet Explorer, and Microsoft, too, for creating and perpetuating the problem. If you are using MSIE and this site doesn't look right, please use a better, more capable, standards-compliant browser. You have plenty to choose from. (News bulletin! There's hope for MSIE8 [offsite]! Woo-hoo!)

Here's the list of browsers that I've used to test my pages (with the exceptions noted). Follow the link to see a snapshot of how the "Can the Church Deny It?" page is displayed by that browser.