Internet Exploder Chokes on W3C Page!

News? I wouldn't think so but supposedly the browser that practically owns the internet has gotten it's act together. Don't you believe it! IE may have gotten better, but it seems the old M$ formula of only improving what will get market share is still in effect. I'm here to tell you that if you didn't know, this is once again reprehensible behavior from the high tech felons we love to hate. For those of your who haven't gotten the clue I have it for you.

On September 14th Jeff Brubaker informed me that the Quanta site was not displaying correctly on IE 6 and sent me a screenshot. After a brief review the rendering issues were obvious. I will detail them here.

M$ IE 6	KDE Konqueror

Error 1. Inability to render alpha blending in PNG. This has been a problem for some time. Your alternative is GIF which is no choice at all. Some users are petitioning Microsoft to deliver on what they have been promising for years. If you're using windoze we're not. Try Opera.

Error 2. Poor rendering of tables even though they conform with W3C validation. You will notice in the screen shot that on the right side where the third column is it moves several pixels to the left. You can validate this clearly by looking at the underlying code. It's simple math. IE just doesn't add it up. Ironically I was sent complaints from someone running Mozilla undwer Windows and the images there were even worse! They showed breaks between the table cells even though they were not in the HTML and rendered correctly on even Mozilla on Linux.

Error 3. Botched rendering of successive tables! I also noted with Jeff's screen shot that there was a missing news item. I sent him the HTML from souce I pulled from konqi as the page is generated with PHP. His response what that two successive tables did not render one under the other but instead rendered one beside the other! As if this weren't a bad enough error it was aparent that IE 6 failed to expand the center column of the table and further it simply painted the third column over it and truncated the rest! Jeff offered a solution he tested to work. That is encapsulating the tables in another table and focing them to render vertically by placing each table in a new row. Before you say too much bad about IE please note that even after this I was sent a screen shot from Mozilla on Windows (I think it was 1.1) that failed to render recursive tables correctly and still displayed them side by side even though they were in seperate rows! Mozilla made this easy to see by rendering the successive tables painfully overlapping the right column leaving it completely illegible! I'm not making this up. I tested it on version 0.85 on Linux and it rendered correctly.

So what does it look like on Konqueror? Have a look. Konqueror may not be perfect but at least it renders a basic page right.