I sometimes wonder why different browsers see HTML, CSS and JavaScript in different ways. It frequently makes my life that much more interesting as a web developer. What works in one browser, won’t work, or won’t even exist in another one. Luckily, these aren’t usually large issues.

One of those peculiar discrepancies is the margin and padding of the paragraph and header tags. In IE there is no difference between using margin and padding for the spacing between paragraphs (and in Firefox, for the most part, there isn’t a difference there either). However, the interesting thing happens when the div containing the paragraph or header has a background. Firefox makes margins tear large holes in the background, forming unsightly gaps in the website layout that shouldn’t otherwise be there. That was the most interesting bug so far, since Firefox doesn’t usually have such issues. The only fix for this problem was to set margins to nothing, and use padding instead.

Also, you might know about the infamous line break bug in IE… Where IE reads the file’s line feed and carriage returns and uses them to make gaps in certain places on web pages (which is quite odd since all browsers are supposed to ignore whitespace altogether – the only thing they’re supposed to do with it is make single space between words in the content of the page). If you’ve used tables with cells that contain images, you’ll know what I mean (actually, you’ll only see this happen if the closing table data tag is on another line than its content).

I find it quite interesting to have found a bug in Firefox, as I’m sure most geeks know that Firefox is supposed to be standards compliant. And I’m calling it a bug because a margin isn’t supposed to mess up the background of its container div. Because if that was part of the standard, I would say it’s really weird.

I’m finished my rant (many of you may be exhaling in relief at this very moment). Thank you for your time. You may continue your regularly scheduled day.

I believe the time of the PNG has finally come to the IE user base. We recently checked our site usage statistics, and found that a little over 75% of users now view the internet through IE7. The reason these two facts are connected, as you may already know, is that IE6 ignored the PNG’s transparency. The only workaround offered was impractical, required JavaScript to be enabled, IE-specific conditional CSS, and the use of Microsoft’s filter library in order to make IE behave properly. Thankfully, that is all behind us now. I have also made it all official (at least to myself) by using my first PNGs’ in one of our new client sites.

The reason this issue is one of those in contention within the greater scope of the great internet browser debacle is the fact that IE, being the most popular browser by far, was the last browser to adopt the PNG standard. The geeks knew that this was unacceptable, and the general user demographic simply shrugged and continued to wonder why certain funky websites didn’t quite look right. I have no reason to offer for this apparent blunder, but someone at Microsoft might know.

This is just a sign that Microsoft has spent the last few years attempting to re-envigorate their look and get themselves into the 21^st century market. Just excuse them the error of Vista, and you might just finally have an operating system that makes sense (but this is being optimistic). I am not going to bash any one developer, as that has never gotten anyone anywhere. Also, there is enough bashing in progress across the myriad websites devoted to the subject that I don’t need to add my 2 cents to it. To indicate my solidarity, the only browser I’ve used consistently is IE.

I’m the web developer at Creative Unity, and have been for little over a year now. In that short space of time, I’ve learned more about website creation and maintenance than I have during the previous  4 years of college I subjected myself to (imagine that). It makes me fairly new to the workforce, and a budding guru in the field of web development (yes, I still have a lot to learn).