This site appears to use a fairly simple layout doesn’t it? Thats because it does. Its basically one column, and its got a little grey sidebar floated over there.

So why is it proving to be such a [string of expletives] to get it to work properly in Internet Explorer 6? Huh? Its because there’s a little grey sidebar floated over there.

Incredibly, it works better in the veritable old IE5.5 than it does in its big brother.

Apart from the fact that Internet Explorer is incredibly insecure and prone to being hacked, its layout engine (the bit that draws stuff on the screen) is fundamentally flawed. Start floating things around the screen and it gets all confused and things begin to go horribly horribly wrong.

Why is it still like this? Mainly because it laid stagnant for several years (when it had no real competition), and then when Microsoft did get around to working on it again, they’ve been too busy patching up all of the enourmous security holes to worry about how it carries out its primary function: drawing pages on the screen. I’m not bitter.

Ever so sorry. I need to have one of these rants about it every once in a while. You know, my life would be a lot easier if you lot would use Firefox or another decent browser. Get to it right away or I’ll set the h@xx0r5 on your system.

Update: I made it work!!!

It meant completely rethinking the site layout, but I made it work in IE. I had to use absolute positioning and lose the spangly footer in the end. Bah humbug.