I remember a good while ago, a young man by the name of Ste (by the way, if you’re reading this, how the hell are you ya old sod?!) advising of his hatred for Internet Explorer to anyone who’d listen, and the beauties offered by Firefox for PC.  In fact it was probably the same chap who actually got me switched on to Firefox in the first place.

At the time, Ste was building a lovely, shiny, CMS (or Content Management System) which he hopefully one day would be able to license to those who may want one.  To do this he was learning all sorts of web application languages, and doing a far amount of testing in a number of browsers.  No browser is perfect granted, but he always seemed to get more pissed off at IE.

Never before did I understand quite why it was such a pain in the arse until I began coding myself!

I recently picked up a copy of CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions (a superb read if your CSS skills need a boost).  It’s amazing just how many times I’ve read ‘Unfortunately, this technique does not work in IE’ or similar, to the point that everytime I saw the word ‘unfortunately’ I skipped the rest of the sentence knowing what it was going to say!

What I don’t understand, is if Microsoft are so involved in the Web Standards debate, whilst having the majority share of browser user coverage, why can’t they make a more compliant browser?  It just befuddles me completely!

To be fair, IE 7 alledgedly solves alot of the issues of 6, adding in more support for CSS 2 (although god help us when CSS 3 comes out).  I say alledgedly because I don’t use 7 at home or work, becuase the work servers haven’t been updated with it, and I just cannot get to grips with it at home after using Firefox for so long now.  I do find it funny how IE is now looking and acting more like Firefox, a la Vista and OS X!

Does mean one thing though.  Browser testing of my first real site should be fun*.

What a journey this web malarkey is!

*Note: Tongue was firmly placed in cheek whilst typing that!

Especially if that someone else has written code when they only have half an idea of what they’re doing!

I’m talking about XHTML and CSS in particular.

Unfortunately Project BD has taken a bit of a back shelf stance at the moment, at least in terms of making the physical site anyway.  Two reasons for this:

1. I’m concetnrating on writing more content for the site first, so I actually have something to build it out of, rather than a vague idea in my head.
2. I’m still learning alot of CSS and how to use it effectively.

Point 2 has come very much into play this week as I’ve been given some more time to work on the department Intranet site.  I started making early pages using *shudder* table design, which was before I began to look into CSS layouts more.  As a result, those early pages are a fucking mess, especially as I’m also now trying to code in Web Standards.

To explain for any of you who don’t knwo HTML et al, (X)HTML is used to ‘mark-up’ the content of the page, CSS is used to present it well and make the page look good.  That’s a very simplistic breakdown but it gives you an idea.

To get techy again, I now have some pages that are a mix of table and CSS layout, and it’s getting to be a pain.  So much so, I’m now getting to the point of questioning whether I go back, and recode those early pages to do away with the table layout aspects.  If it were one or two pages, I’d do it and take the development time hit, but I’m looking at some 20 pages plus.  If I get the CSS right then it’s simply a case of applying the new stylesheet to all of them, but some pages have little unique aspects that don’t appear everywhere.

For anybody who’s learning now, or is thinking about picking up XHTML and co, go for it, you won’t regret it as it’s a great journey to go through.  But for the love of your own sanity, get your head into CSS layouts, Web Standards and semantics BEFORE your fingers starting tapping out your masterpiece.  It’ll save you a lot of stress later!

PS. Forgot to mention this nearly, but my own personal blog has moved over to Wordpress now because I wanted an environment I could play with the layout and style of my blog as a bit of a code testbed.  I am also using as it’s main function i.e. a blog, so feel free to potter over to boidster.wordpress.com.

This week is slowly, but surely, becoming extremely bloody frustrating!

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve been tasked with redeveloping an intranet site used by the department in which I work.  This website coding is way outside of the job I am acutally employed and paid to do (it’s a consumer services department dealing with complaints and enquiries).  Due to the nature of that job, we have a constant and consistent influx of contacts to deal with by post, email and phone.

This means that I have to wait until we are caught up, or at least within a day of ourselves on workload, before I am given more time to work on said intranet site.  Why is it frustrating?

Try only having had 10 working days out of a possible 9 weeks worth to actually do any coding!  Given that I reckon I need at least another six working weeks to even get anywhere near finished, I’m getting rather f***ed off with the whole situation.

My boss knows what time scales I need, I’m working my arse off to try and help get the work caught up so I can get some time, yet I’m into the third week since I was last given coding time and I’m not sure I’ll get anything next week.

Ok, so it’s not the end of the world, but when you’re normal job is basically one big repetition and bores the living crap out of you, that is when frustration and not getting to do something stimulating actually kicks in.

With the nature of the coding work and the size of the overall project, it’s easy to get lost, and forget the minute details of what I’ve done.  Sure, I have notes and reminders, but it can take half a day sometimes to go through everything and work out where I got to.  My only saving grace is that I’m keeping the design as simple as possible because it doesn’t need anything fancy or flash (no pun intended) as it’s mostly data presentation to an audience who already know alot of it; they just need to find it quickly which the current site can’t always offer.

I think I need a drink!