Everybody STUMBLE!

I thought I'd point this out, but in IE 7, all your networking icon links appear as little red smudges below the comic (screen shot: http://client.hughes-stl.com/harold/evilinc.jpg). They are still links. I can barely click on them. But they are squished down to almost nothing for some reason. This happens both on my IE 7 at home and my IE 7 at work.

IE7: Microsoft's answer to a working browswer. :)

Let's be honest here and point out that those buttons are not the only thing IE 7 does not render correctly on the Evil Inc website. Im guessing the text boxes uses rounded corner CSS which IE 7 doesn't render. If it's proper HTML and CSS the only thing you can do is shrug your shoulders and then procede to bash your head up against the wall.

I didn't make the post to start an IE bashing thead. I wanted to see if other people were noticing the same thing.

As for "proper HTML and CSS", the site is a mesh of HTML and XHTML and conforms to neither standard. Nor does it use proper CSS in many places. The links in question are a UL that has all the bullets turned off and the LI bits inline to try to make some weird inline bulleted list without bullets.

The reason the links are showing up as red smudges is because in the CSS they have a font-size specifically set to 0px for some reason in the CSS (line 237). In this case, IE is doing exactly what the style sheet is telling it to.

"It's just IE" or "it's just Firefox" seems to be an excuse rather than a good reason not to bother to go look at why something is wrong. From a good business standpoint you cannot have a site that only works in one browser and not others. It should work well in Firefox, IE, and maybe Safari.

A simple tweak to the CSS would probably fix this problem. If you take out line 237 in your CSS, it should be fine.

I didn't mean that to come off sounding angry. I just hear that excuse "It's just IE" or "It's just FireFox" a lot in my line of web site work, and it has become somewhat of a hot button for me.

I love your comic. I read it all the time and have even read all of the Greystone comics. I was just trying to alert you to a weird issue in your CSS file.

That "font size 0" thing was incredibly helpful! It's on the list for fixin'

Thanks so much! :)

You obviously don't have a lot of experience with website design. Microsoft makes it extremely painful to figure out if it's their fault or your fault. The only reliable fall back is to ignore IE until the very end and to see how badly it renders your website.

I have 10 years of website programming experience for primarly heavy corporate websites where IE is the standard browser for 75 - 90% of the users. IE cannot be ignored until the end esp. when the client who is paying you to make their site is 75% of the time going to be viewing it in IE in corporate environments. I am a programmer/developer, not a designer. We look at the site in IE and Firefox throughout the conversion from Photoshop PSD into HTML. That way we can identify potential issues immediately rather than waiting until the end.

Most of the problems with IE vs. Firefox that I have deal with the different opinion of the "box" layout regarding how to handle padding. So, I avoid padding in fixed-width elements where posible (use embedded margins instead), and specify overflow elsewhere (IE has a default overflow value where FireFox does not). That clears up a lot of standard issues.

The rare issue that I have that cannot be rendered in IE the same as in Firefox generally is because the designer did something weird with a standard element, like rounded textboxes. In those cases, I just use background images.

I admit to waiting until the end to look at the site in Safari. You'd think that with both FireFox and Safari being Mozilla-based that they would render the same, but noooo. Usually it is minor though.