The thing about standards compliance

You may or may not have noticed it. I only found out through a chance check, that my blog doesn't display properly in Internet Explorer. Apparently, some of the CSS tags used in this page template aren't supported my Microsoft's web browser.

I use Firefox for my regular web surfing. Although I had problems viewing certain pages before, this was due to a faulty extension, and now everything works correctly. Everything, including pages I needed to open up MSIE for.

Firefox is a standards-compliant browser. This means that if the HTML is valid according to the W3C's document definitions, it WILL display correctly. It also has better support for CSS tags. In the case of this blog, it supports the position:fixed attribute that I use to keep my shoutbox and page background still while you happily scroll down my entries and links bar.

MSIE does not support this attribute. In addition to the blog looking like rubbish, the scrollbar disappears. Since I started using Firefox a year and a half ago I have been of the opinion that MSIE sucks, and this occurence just makes my case stronger.

Due to final exams and the pressing need to study and prepare for them so that I don't fail my year, it'll be a while before I find a workaround for this. Until then (and even thereafter) I shall urge everyone seeing this page to switch to Firefox or Mozilla or Opera (basically anything that follows the Web community standards and not one corporation's proprietary definitions on how a Web page should be displayed).

EDIT Update: I have put up a quick fix for the problem using a conditional comment. If MSIE is used to view the page the shoutbox will scroll with the page. On any standards compliant browser (e.g. Firefox, Opera, Netscape, Mozilla) the shoutbox will be fixed in its position on the screen. I intend to leave it this way.