So there I was, feeling smug about my new ver 0.2 theme, and I get to hospital to bask in its glory when I had a deep realization of panic — it breaks when not viewed in FF1.5!

(gasp!)

And its not optimized for resolutions less than 1024×764!

(double gasp!)

MSIE practically strokes out when it tries to render!

(triple ga– *faints)

What to do, what to do, what to do?

I guess at some point in the development cycle of a ’software’ project you get to the *un*fun part, and that is the bug stomping and otherwise tweaking for maximum compatibility-ness.

I used to do a lot more web design a few years ago — before Medical School (1999), and with the Browser Wars it made browser compatibility issues such a headache I just didn’t bother.

Although there are seemingly MORE browsers around these days (Firefox, Opera, MSIE, Safari, and so on), the consensus seems that there is a better trend towards compatibility and web standards than the past.

Thank God.

Well, for all of the two people who know or read this website (thanks Mom! thanks honey), I may get around to tweaking this theme — optimizing for other browsers and resolutions, if for no other reason that at hospital it looks so sick.

(Not “good” sick, but really sick sick — not cardiogenic shock, sick, but more like nosocomial pneumonia type sick)

The fact that right now it really only looks ok with higher resolutions and firefox mostly betrays my own bias in the browser conflict.

Yeah … I go with Firefox.

I used to roll with Opera — and I loved those mouse gestures, but the seemingly infinite extensibility of Firefox is the greatest boon so far.

In particular, all of those web development extensions.

How could I do without:

1) Webdeveloper — with all of its swiss-army knife css-inspecting, code penetrating goodness?
2) Viewsource — its color-coded view-> source majesty I could never do without
3) ColorZilla — thanks for saving me from my own color-blinded self … the eyedrop tool is worth is weight in gold!
4) MeasureIt — how else are you going adjust a div’s position?
5) Aardvark — your real-time in-browser CSS-outlining abilities kick mammoth butt

Yes, its also faster, and safer apparently.

Is it perfect?
Hell no.

I gots my beefs …

Which is why there’s a part II to this post. Stay tuned!