I Hate Microsoft

<rant>
I’m working on a site for Bethel Lutheran Church in Northfield, and, as with any new site design, the bane of my existence always comes back to cross-browser CSS compatibility. I’ve got my design working beautifully in Safari and Firefox, now comes the scary part: testing in Internet Explorer. I start up Boot Camp and open the page... Surprisingly, IE renders almost the entire page correctly, there’s only one glaring mistake. Fortunately, this *should* be easy to fix, because IE supports conditional comments, meaning I can insert style code that only IE will read and no one else.

Here’s the funny part: in looking up documentation on how exactly to do what I want, I found this little diddy on Microsoft’s site:

Conditional comments make it easy for developers to take advantage of the enhanced features offered by Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 and later versions, while writing pages that downgrade gracefully in less-capable browsers or display correctly in browsers other than Windows Internet Explorer.

It’s terribly ironic, because EVERY OTHER BROWSER is displaying the page correctly, it’s ONLY IE that fails miserably, time after time, site after site. Oh, Microsoft, how I hate you.
</rant>