Tricklin

I realize that I haven't written anything in a rather long time. There are a few reasons for this, the main one being the release of IE7, and the fact that 70% of the pages of my company's online application would not appear correctly when using it. This wouldn't be too big of a deal if Microsoft hadn't announced that IE7 will be part of an automatic update. Because of this, and the fact that an actual date was never stated, our web development team spent countless hours modifying our code on the pages that were having problems with IE7. You may be surprised to hear read this, but in a way, I have been able to see this as a good thing.

A Good Thing? You Must Be Out Of Your Mind!
Yeah, I know, spending 14 hours a day for the past 2 weeks re-writing html pages just so they work in one browser doesn't sound like "A Good Thing". After all, the entire application worked fine in Firefox, Opera, IE6, etc. How can I possibly say this is a good thing? Well, let me start off by saying that this application was originally created in 1998, and about 4 years later, was revamped a bit, but as far as a focus on well formed, standards compliant html code goes, this never surfaced as a concern for us. We created the pages to work, with little concern about the format of the code. So, all pages used tables for formatting, and would have failed a validation test miserably.

After testing our pages in IE7, and doing numerous things to try and get the pages to display correctly to no avail, we decided that the best course of action would be for us to rewrite our pages with standards compliant xhtml/css code, and get rid of tables altogether (only using them for their intended purpose). In a company of our size, with only 4 web developers, this change might never have happened (for sure not this quickly). But with the rollout of IE7, we were basically strong-armed into doing so. So, I sat down with one other web developer, drew up the basic layouts of our pages, wrote up a quick style sheet that would allow for this, and created documentation that explained how to implement this new solution. Once this was done, the 4 of us spent the next 2 weeks re-writing the pages that needed the new treatment. We are by no means done, as there are many more files that need this treatment, however, we are now on the right track to making our application standards compliant, with well formed xthml/css code.

There you have it... The release of IE7, at least in this case, is a good thing.