Microsoft is making me swear again

If you don't like profanity, go somewhere else.

I've done everything I can to free myself from the evil clutches of Microsoft. I use a different operating system. I use a different office suite. I use a different web browser. Even at work, where we're forced to use Windows, I still use Firefox and OpenOffice. And I'm going to start bringing in my Linux laptop to get a breath of fresh air.

Even my company's website avoids Windows as much as possible. The site is hosted on Linux and I got my IT guy to install Dreamweaver so we could avoid Windows and Frontpage. Meanwhile 65% of our visitors use Internet Explorer, but that's ok because the web guy and I found CSS code that looks roughly the same whether you're using Firefox or IE.

And then IE 7 came along. And broke our website.

We didn't even notice there was a problem until we were using the computer in the large conference room. As a matter of policy, our IT guy won't install IE 7 on company computers, but somehow it got on the computer in the conference room. And, of course, I need to give a presentation tomorrow to the entire team. On our website. Using IE7.

A lot of people have been discovering that IE7 "breaks" your website, even if it works fine in IE6. But usually the problem is because IE6 was not CSS-compliant whereas every single other browser in the goddamn world is (FF, Safari, etc.). So over the years (and IE6 has been with us for many, many years) people have come up with hacks to make IE6 and FF look the same. Now IE7 is more compliant (although not fully compliant; this is still Microsoft), and it refuses to recognize the hacks (this is Microsoft). So people who were using hacks suddenly find their CSS rendering upside down.

But this shouldn't have been a problem for us because we didn't use hacks. We had CSS code that simply looked the same in IE6 and FF. And IE7 is supposed to be more compliant, so it shouldn't be adding problems in that respect. According to all the third-party sites I've read. And yet, somehow, it's breaking my goddamn site.

Do you know CSS? Do you know IE7 compliance? Don't email, don't post a comment. Call me. Or IM. Please. It's 6:34pm. I'm not leaving work until I've fixed this.

J