Well, I recently finished a website that I am so pleased with. I think it’s my best so far. And please don’t think I’m being immodest here. All the design ideas came from the client, and every time she said “try this” it looked better. I made her a matching business card, too, and I just can’t stop staring at it. It is GORGEOUS!

Yep, the design ideas were all hers, but the coding, that was me, and whew! It looks like a very simple layout, doesn’t it? It is a very simple layout. I wrote it up in beautiful, clean, pure, standards-compliant code. And it looked great, until I checked it in Internet Explorer for Windows. I work on a Mac (of course :)), but I have a subscription to this very handy service that allows you to log in remotely to a Windows machine, make screen captures, etc. I don’t know what I’d do without that service. So, in IE/Win, the layout was broken on one page only. There was another page, identical in every respect except the content, that was just fine. How could that be? How come the list of websites was fine but the list of books was not?

Are you ready for the answer? The answer that took me an entire morning to figure out? In the list of books, the titles were in italics. Yes, italics. Internet f**ing Explorer can’t even handle italics. This is a known bug, believe it or not. I even knew it was a known bug, but (famous last words) I never thought it would happen to me. Fortunately, my client was gracious enough to agree that the book titles didn’t need to be in italics, so I didn’t have to try the horrendous fix.

Please, if you haven’t already, Get Firefox!