I actually came across this today. In case you can’t see the screengrab I made, or think it’s doctored (apart from blurring the application name), it really does genuinely say:
…requires a more current browser, such as Internet Explorer 5.5 (Windows), Mozilla 1.7, Firefox 1.0 or Netscape 7.2.
I had to actually read it a few times. To put it a little more in perspective, I’m using Google Chrome 9.0.597.84… What I don’t get is why anyone would think IE 5.5 is a current browser, in any sense of the word. Well… that’s shoddy browser detection for you!
When writing my new sites I try to use the new features of HTML5 and CSS3 and so on where appropriate. Specifically at the moment I’m styling up a blog posts page and want to apply style to the new HTML5 <footer> tag.
Firstly, to use the new HTML5 elements as you would’ve a <div> in XHTML or older HTML, you need to tell your clients’ browser to render these new elements as block-level:
article, aside, footer, header, section {
display: block;
}Once that’s done you’ll also need to include a special Javascript for older Internet Explorer browsers to enable styling of the new elements. I’ve not had a chance to look at this script in detail (it’s minified, I’m lazy…), but I’m confident it’ll do the job. Just to note that it’s only Internet Explorer you need this fix for – Gecko and WebKit-based browsers automatically style any unknown elements (and thus these new HTML5 elements). The script homepage at time of writing is here, all credit for the script goes to Remy Sharp. To use it, simply put this in your tag:
<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<script src="http://html5shim.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>
<![endif]-->
The script is hosted on Google Code, but you can download it to put on your own server to save an extra DNS request.
If you’re reading this on the site as opposed to your normal feed reader, then you’ll notice my brand new shiny theme. If you’re reading it in IE, it will look crap. It works in Firefox, but I have yet to do IE-compatibility – if anyone fancies taking a gander at the code and fixing it for me, please do! I’ve got some minor tweaks to do to it (comments are un-styled at the moment for example), but mostly I’m quite happy with it. If anyone notices anything broken or odd, please do let me know!
Edit: I’ve decided I prefer the way it looks in IE, so I modified the theme so Firefox matches the layout of the IE theme 
I’ve done a little more work on the re-re-vamped Total Carnage site. It’s starting to take shape and look a little more like a real website now. So far, the niceness only works in Firefox as I’m using solid div background colours with an alpha-blended PNG to add highlights. I’m led to believe this technique can be used in Internet Explorer, but I’ve got to look into this still (due to IE’s inability to display alpha-blended PNG images…). The idea of doing things this way is to eventually have a user-configurable colour scheme. I’m basing it on a pasty-orange colour to start with, but I might change that, but of course, doing things this way makes it easier to change the colour scheme.
Under Jon from work’s recommendation, and some research by myself I found out it’s better to use XHTML 1.0 as silly IE doesn’t understand valid XHTML 1.1 properly as it does not accept the application/xhtml-xml content-type header properly. I’m not bothered either way, but I’m making sure it’s valid XHTML and CSS all the way. You might notice that the Ext JS isn’t valid CSS, so I base the “valid CSS” theory on just the CSS I’ve written, which is technically cheating a bit, but I don’t have the time/energy to go through all the Ext JS stylesheets and make them valid CSS.
The whole seperating the content from the design thing is going well nonetheless, and have a look here if you want to see how the site is progressing.
I was sent a link to a Microsoft KB article which related to IE8′s new standards compatibility mode. When I read through it, I don’t know why or what made me laugh, but I found this quote amusing and just had to make a picture out of it.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 end-users can work around these issues by pressing Emulate IE7 on the menu bar in the browser window. When the Emulate IE7 button is depressed, Web pages will display in Internet Explorer 7 Standards mode.
Oh noes! The Emulate IE7 button is depressed! Must get him some prozac…
