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What I am going to do is something I've been considering for a long time, but until now I haven't followed through. Here is a fact to consider: this relies heavily on CSS, a standard which allows one to separate style from content. The benefits of this are that you can ensure all your pages conform to a consistent design with ease, the ability to change minor details many documents by changing one file, and it saves space and should load slightly faster.

Here is another fact: Internet Explorer (IE), which grows in usage at an alarming rate, does not comply very well with the standards for CSS. The standards compliance is just good enough, in IE, that you can design a site using CSS and, if you play your cards right, you can manage your CSS so that IE and other browsers display your pages just about the same. The trades off, however, are the headaches from trying to get IE to play nice, time wasted that you'll never get back, and you lose a lot of potential functionality.

In the past, I've managed to find work arounds or design revisions to keep CSS-powered pages consistent regardless of browser; this is changing. We are now in the second generation of "My Christian Site" (which will soon be renamed as simply "john15.net"-- this will finalize the transition). There have been a lot of background changes, and some new features in the foreground. The site has changed a lot since I first went live, and most of these changes haven't been an issue with cross-browser operatbility. However, there are features in the recent, major edit which will not render properly in IE. One is the news box on the index page, which as you can see in the cropped image linked here, was going all the way to the right edge of the text area when IE was maximized. The second, which isn't as important, is IE's notorious lack of support for fixed positioning. If you haven't noticed, I've redesigned the footer section, and from now on, new pages will have two boxes like below:

Quick Navigation ... These boxes link back to the home page (the one to the left) and to a printer friendly version of the page you are at (the right). Where they show up, however, depends on your browser: if it supports "position: fixed," you will see it at the bottom left corner of the browser window. However, if you use IE, it shows up at the end of the document, after you scroll down. This isn't important, but it would be convenient to be able to quickly jump to the home page or white print page without having to scroll for it.

In the past, I would have simply labored to find a workaround so features like these worked the way I intended even in Internet Explorer. However, I am in general frustrated with having to find workarounds to make sure my pages are displayed the way they were supposed to be rendered. For the news box, I would have had to use more conditional IE tags than I have, and I would lose my valid HTML 4.01 status if I use the ones which aren't hidden by spoofing comment tags; and to this very moment I still haven't figure out what exactly is wrong. That, ladies and gentlemen, is why you cannot see the news box if you are using IE.

In order to replicate the quick navigation boxes in IE, I would likely have to use DHTML or some nasty hack. I wouldn't touch DHTML with a mile long OC-3 cable, and besides the result would be inferior to boxes fixed by CSS. The kind of hack involved would likely involve a bug exploit of some sort, which undermines the virtue in writing valid HTML and CSS.

So from this moment on, I will not write code for Internet Explorer for this site. It is unfortunate, as I know most of my audience probably uses IE. But, this is something I shouldn't have to do anyways. I don't blame users of Internet Explorer: I blame those responsible for ensuring it is standards compliant. Maybe they will fix it in the future. Since it sounds like the next version of IE won't come out until the next big Windows release, I won't be holding my breath.

What I will do, however, is check my site in IE after every big change, to see if there are any bugs. Serious problems which affect the functionality of this site will be addressed (think news box!!!). Minor glitches will likely be left alone. I want to ensure that this site is not restricted from any browser; however, be aware that IE users will not see and use the full potential of this site.

That said, why would you continue using Internet Explorer? After all the security issues, problems with standards compliance, and so on, I am in awe that people endure it. There are, in fact, other browsers out there for free, which already are superior to IE in every way (except ActiveX, which is not needed for 99.99999% of legitimate web applications). They are getting better, while IE will stagnate until the next Windows OS comes out.

My own personal favorite, which is a free, open source web browser, is Mozilla's Firefox. Firefox has nearly all the features of Internet Explorer, and it is one of the most standards compliant browsers out there. You are practically guaranteed that so long as the wed designer wrote a web page correctly, Firefox will render it correctly. It is already considerably faster than IE on most operating systems, but advanced users can manipulate its configuration file and make Firefox even faster. Do you tend to have too many browser windows open? Firefox comes with tabbed browsing, which can clean up your task-bar for power users. You can also get extensions, which give you more functionality.

The current version of Firefox is 0.8, which means that it is buggier than you would expect from a 1.0 software version. However, Firefox is already no less buggy, in my professional opinion, than Internet Explorer 6.0.

If you want to know more, you can go to the Firefox website. If you haven't checked it out yet, I strongly encourage you to download the self installing variation, and give it a try.