Sometimes I forget just how bad my homepage looks in IE. I’ve just performed a few fixit hacks, but I’m still not happy.

So, I just measured, and approximately 7% of the blogosphere is nonsense whining about Internet Explorer.

Since I’ve just caved and set up a blog, why resist being another one of the sheople? I haven’t complained about IE since IE5.0 was avant garde, and 7′s just coming out; in the fine web tradition of publishing material which is due to be out of date in a few months, let’s get to kvetching.

I just tore a bunch of neat formatting tricks out of my page, because they had been very tenuously hidden in IE with some hacks I don’t care to remake. I installed a few mediawiki extensions (after some editing) and as such needed to change the page framing somewhat. I’m not sure if that’s when the hacks came undone; it seems more likely it was when I upgraded mediawiki, as I may well have forgotten to check my page in IE. The corner icon was misplaced, the framing lines weren’t transparent but an ugly black, et cetera. I also fixed some margins.

Thing is, I’m considering putting ads back onto my page, and getting the right aligned 3rd column was kind of a hassle in Monobook (I use a heavily modified version of MediaWiki’s default stylesheet, which while pretty carries all the code savvy of a bag of hammers; it’s a hackish mess, but it’s too big for me to give enough of a damn to fix.) One particularly nauseatingly awful thing is that the stylesheet, instead of taking the time to hammer out portable correctness, has specialty stylesheets for each major browser which are loaded to deal with native formatting errors.

The maintenance nightmare which erupts as a result is surprisingly awful.

So, the IE7 team has been saying all the right things in their MSDN blogs, about how they want people to abolish the hacks they’ve been perpetrating for older IE, and replace them with modern, accurate stylesheets. It’s weird to think of IE as standards-advocative, but recently they’ve been exactly that, and as much malice as I bear towards the predecessor product, one should give credit where credit is due; this team knows how to talk the talk. (Granted my paranoia suggests they’re doing it to effect browser rollover, but that’s not the point.)

Anyhoo, I have high hopes. The stakes are a little different for me than for most; I use embedded MSHTML extensively. (My god does it piss me off that the directx image alpha filter doesn’t understand res:// .) With appropriate PNG support, a fixed box model and better support for auto margins, many things would be miles and miles easier.

‘Course, this means that I’ll still have to write heredity styling for embedded applications on platforms which don’t yet run IE7; whereas people are tolerant of broken web pages, they aren’t of similarly appearance-broken applications (not that I could blame them.) So, it’s a step in the right direction, but until I start callously cutting people away, it’s not enough.

Still, it’s better than nothing.