I’m a mac guy. I admit it. I love Apple computers. I’m also a standards guys; NTSC, PAL, REC 709, HTML, and CSS. For video, we have scopes to tell us if we are meeting the standards requirements. We have Waveform monitors to show us the highlights, and the shadows, we have Vectorscopes to show us the colors and saturation. In web programming we have W3C validation tools. As with televisions and displays, nothing is perfect. Underscan areas are different on each model, colors are never set right it seems, so the image someone might be getting down the line may look drastically different than what you’re seeing.

There are many different browsers out there such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and many others most of us have never heard of. I use Firefox almost exclusively. Mostly on my mac, but also on my PC. To make a long story not quite as long, I didn’t test my site with Internet Explorer. The web browser 70% of all hits come from.

A user e-mailed me and let me know they could not log into the forum, so I went and checked in firefox and it worked fine, but then I decided to check it in Internet Explorer. The first thing I noticed was that, the front page was displaying all wrong. So, I did some checking and found an entire internet full of IE bugs and fixes. The biggest bug that I found was one, where IE doubled the margin of any element in a float. The float is how I have 3 columns on my page with out using an html table for layout. There were fixes out there, but they didn’t work for some reason. I then finally found a way to tell IE to use a specific sytles heet. A style sheet is an external Cascading Style Sheet file that sets the parameters for elements such as font size, color, areas, blocks, basically everything could be in a CSS document.

Again, I’m making this story way too long. Basically, now if you use Internet Explorer, you get a special style sheet that makes the page appear right. Everyone else get the standards compliant css file. The forum also did not work, so I upgraded to the new forum software, which of course, is completely different design-wise.

So, the next week or so, you will see me trying to get the design back to where I want it to be. Feel free to keep posting and keep searching, but not everything will look right. I hope now more people will post on the site, as it works in Internet Explorer.

-Thomas A. Koch