I’m a Firefox/Mozilla user – have used it since the early ‘M’ versions – and it has been months since I cranked up Internet Explorer, especially since most of my time is spent using my Linux desktop not my Windows laptop. Over time I’ve made tweaks to this site’s theme as I’ve moved stuff, added links, etc. It looked great to me in Firefox. Well, for some reason I happened to start IE and load the site. Oh. My. God. It was a disaster. Stuff was overlapping, the main content was WAY down the page. It was a style sheet disaster. And none of my 5 readers told me!

Turns out after one tweak I made a slight HTML error and it cascaded from there. The W3 Validator puked horribly when I checked it out. As someone who has done web stuff since the web was born, it was pretty embarrassing. Seems Firefox was a bit more forgiving than IE was and I never knew anything was wrong.

After a few hours of debugging, everything is fixed up and working properly again. The style sheet is in much better shape, some plugins are fixed, and the HTML isn’t such a nightmare. My apologies to you IE users – I didn’t realize things had gotten so out of whack.

That’ll teach me to stop being lazy and a) use IE to test after any tweaks and b) to run the validator more often. For those of you webheads out there – yes I know I still have a couple XHTML 1.0 Strict errors, but I can’t get rid of the one IFRAME and I refuse to replace target="_blank" with rel="external" and JavaScript – that’s insane.