So… the other day a friend of mine and I were having some shop talk about xhtml and css. We were doing some site testing and came across Jeffrey Zeldmans- Zeldman.com in Internet Explorer 5 on the pc. I hadn’t even thought about it as I’m a mac user and specifically a Firefox advocate. So i’m usually seeing his site and alistapart in Firefox. Well what we found was kind of disheartening… I think the css image links aren’t showing up because of how IE5 pc handles text-indent.. I was having this problem as well with my site header image not showing up in IE5 pc unless I used a span with a display property of none. I’m sure this is not news to Zeldman. The thing thats hard for me is that I’ve learned so much from the man and on a bit more personal note I’ve recommended him for THE standards based coding example and sent his link to some pc friends of mine who I know are using IE5. At the time I hadn’t even seen his site in IE5. Just makes for a bit of embarrassment when they say that the site is messed up, after trying to persuade them to use standards in their work. This tends to enforce the opinion some of them have already that standards and css aren’t applicable to real life projects. Which I think Zeldman thoroughly proved that they are in his book. On the other hand the man is expecting a wonderful baby and is busy with things more important than websites, that I can completely understand, and probably has a ton of stuff on his plate. Maybe in between all that he can hook it up proper.
NEWZ_
6.14.2004
14 Zeldman in IE5 pc
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- 102 at it again…
Todd Lambert
6.14.2004 | 25 minutes after the fact.
I am glad you posted about this, as I agree that this is something that can reflect poorly on the standards based design movement going on.
As you know, I ran across an issue very similar to this with my recent redesign and ended up having to revert to using superfluous span tags in order to calm IE 5 into doing the right thing.
This was a decision made after quite a bit of thought as I did not want to add code cruft to the page but in my case it centered around navigation which is a pretty vital element of the site and there are just too many users still stuck in the IE 5 world for me to forgoe them just because I wanted “pure” markup.
I think Zeldman has made an error here and should lean more to the usability side rather than the code-purist side on this issue. Hopefully he can correct this issue and get his site un-borked soon.
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David
6.15.2004 | 18 hours, 18 minutes after the fact.
interesting… yeah, I agree that it’s a little weird. However, I wonder if he, like you and I, just decided on his personal site not to make any attempt to support that. You and I have discussed this before, that whereas a client may want their site to support everything from Firefox to Netscape 4.0, on our OWN sites, we can decide to only support more progressive browsers. I just wonder if IE5 is where Zeldman drew the line for his personal site. ya gotta draw it somewhere.
or, like you said, maybe he just has a lot on his plate.
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David
6.15.2004 | 18 hours, 19 minutes after the fact.
… btw - I do agree that it’s a little disheartening. I would like to think that of all people, his site would degrade more elegantly than that. (and possibly not at all in IE5)
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cF
6.15.2004 | 18 hours, 29 minutes after the fact.
Todd, regarding the useability, I really feel thats the stance he takes the majority of the time which is why the suprise here…
D- yeah the personal decisions definetely come into play, although here I wonder if that was the case, He mentions in his book about the IE whitespace bug that removing the whitespace in our markup “..is harder to read and edit than the normal version that uses whitespace, but we have no choice if we want our site to display correctly in an extremely popular browser” (p288)
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David
6.16.2004 | 1 day, 21 hours after the fact.
for what it’s worth… his site has some display problems in IE5/Mac as well… not nearly as bad as what you saw on a PC, but problems still. I really wonder if he just decided to not fully support IE. I mean, come on - it’s not like any of us WANT to support is if we don’t have to :)
also… you could ask him…
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