Hello Friends,

A straight answer to my question is… “To Browse The Internet”. Since the very beginning of the internet, people have used IE. I know it is because of ignorance of a common man, that such a buggy software as “Internet Explorer” is still on the scene in such a huge way. I myself used to spend hours together on the IE when I was ignorant of the bugs involved in IE.

I began my development with small time HTML development as well as ASP. I used to be a Microsoft fan then. Like many others, they were my “GODs”. I had bought a server for my development purposes which had ASP and ASP .NET facilities (Though I needed only ASP). The server was good in the beginning. My first project there was an online diary. I had developed it for my brother (www.tejuz.com). My development work was almost compelte, when suddenly one day, BOOM… every thing was gone. My server admin notified me of a virus attack. ALAS, my most recent developments werent backed up. So i decided to move on to a Linux Server as I had heard they were better in security. And thus began my Journey of moving out of the Microsoft world.

Convinced that MS wasnt the god, I moved slowly to PHP. My usage of HTML, CSS wasnt quite much. I used to rarely trod the path of CSS. I had always believed that CSS wasnt all that powerful (ofcourse I WAS IGNORANT). Then I decided to move on to CSS. I really wanted to learn what CSS was all about and why people preferred CSS. I will discuss this later on, else will go too off topic :). Then came my days of CSS development.

When developing the 3 column layout, I came across a number of hacks for IE. I never understood why they were and what was their need. I had just found them on the internet and somehow decided to include them in my code. Later on I came to know of various deviations of IE from the W3C standards. It is a pity that such a huge company as Microsoft itself doesnt follow the world standards. IE is considered by most of us developers as non standard browser ( a browser not complying W3C standards). I decided to make a switch over to Firefox, and man i am more than happy at my decision. Join me on this decision.

Download the Firefox browser below:

Hi,

The other day I took up the challenge of getting transparent PNGs for my shadow effect usage. I seriously required them, and as usual, IE was there to corrupt my plans. IE6 was having issues showing the PNG. Somehow the background wasnt transparent at all. So then came the issue of getting a transparent background. I had to do a bit of research on the same topic. I found a few good articles on alistapart.com. But then nothing was actually able to get my doubts cleared. I was again stuck up with the same problem. Atleast for that site, I had to use perfectly cut images to get the shadow effect without the transparent PNGs but now I am obsessed with getting this thing done. There are Javascript fixes for the same i.e using the Microsoft’s AlphaImageLoader filter, which obviously works with only the MS browsers. But sadly this works only for acutal images, not background images. So this is ruled out. There are others too such as http://webfx.eae.net/dhtml/pngbehavior/pngbehavior.html but yet this remains one unsolved question. I will be on it for a while…

In this section I am going to brief you to the difficulties that I have faced during the development of various scripts / sites / code pieces that I have successfully conquered. Hope these things will help you to the best…

Hi,
Surprising to know, many of us designers think tables are non CSS entities. Well first of all I would like to tell you people that tables are a part of CSS and HTML(though I am not their fan. But the other day, while developing a template, I came across the issue of arranging the text as a table, you know, the columns and rows. I was indeed successful in making it work perfectly. But then I realised the amount of CSS becomes a bit too much, and again the flexibility is lost. To this issue, I felt a bit giddy. We use “divs” so that we can keep formatting away from the content, but what is the point in such seperation when you have to use many more divs with more rigidity. I would rather go for a small table layout running more CSS driven. Tables ARE XHTML Strict Valid entities (”target” property isnt). Well I would welcome suggestions from you people.

Thanks

Jyot Vakharia.