October 02, 2006

Look, I know that Internet Explorer comes with your computer. I know that 59.4% of you fine people use it to view this site.

But you just don't get the full Astonished Head experience when you use Explorer.

Here's why: IE's idiosyncratic HTML rendering means that this page doesn't display properly. No, really:

• See the gray background behind the slogan in the header? That's not supposed to be there. Why is it there? Because after six releases, Microsoft still hasn't included support for the proper rendering of .PNG images with transparent backgrounds. I could go back and make them all transparent .GIF's, I suppose, but you know what? I wanted to use PNGs for that, and there are 25 random slogan graphics, and I don't feel like re-doing them all just because IE can't get with the program. Firefox displays it properly.
• See that fugly black line between the right and left columns? That's how IE interprets a border width of "1." In Firefox, it's a nice black hairline border. The way it's supposed to be.
• See how all the "On The Road:" links on the left aren't linespaced properly? That's because IE apparently doesn't know how to consistently render a line break tag. Firefox displays this properly.
• See how the Astonished Headshop text on the left links to my RSS feed, like the RSS graphic a couple of lines above it? I have no idea why IE does this. Firefox doesn't.
• And so on.

Look, just go and get Firefox already. It's free, smaller, faster, more secure, and it means I don't have to do all this stupid work to to get my page to display the way it's supposed to on IE when it displays just fine on Firefox, Opera, and even Netscape.

Plus: tabbed browsing will change your life.

That is all.