As you are probably aware, Internet Explorer is infamous for ignoring standards which has always made building CSS heavy sites very difficult. For example, in a recent article I described how I built a CSS only site, only to find out it didn’t work at all in Internet Explorer 6. God knows what Explorer 5 would have rendered it like!

Anyway, it has come to my attention that there is a solution. It wont stop the errors you get, but you will be able to test and employ the various hacks needed. Here is a link which will allow you to install individual versions on Explorer from version 3 to 6. You can of course get version 7 from Microsoft. Now if only they could release Safari with that too!

I think this is one of the biggest technical issues affecting many web designers at the moment. Many designers (probably most) have now switched over to full CSS design, also known as CSS-P. Its potential advantages are a more useable, flexible and compliant design, however from my experience this isn’t happening yet.

There are really three ways to build a site in terms of mark up:

HTML only
This is the old school way of building websites. Lots of ugly font tags all over the place, and a method of building sites that really is quite dated.

Full CSS
Semantic mark-up and a clear separation between design and content is what this is all about.

Hybrid
A mixture of both above. Read the rest of this entry »