Blog

New Web Site: Update

As mentioned in the new site announcement, there were some compatibility issues with MSIE6. Mainly these were due to the new CSS for the site making heavy use of + (adjacent sibling), > (child) and li:hover selectors, which are not supported by MSIE6 and resulted in some things looking like a Salvador Dali painting and drop-down menus not… dropping down. The known issues should now be resolved, after some unfortunate (but necessary) liberal use of additional tag attributes and a little bit of javascript to activate the drop-downs under MSIE versions earlier than 7.

I had hoped to avoid such workarounds for broken browsers: I was happy to finally drop workarounds for Netscape 4 that were in the previous site design! Plus, there were no machines here still running MSIE6 anymore, and I’d imagine you can’t have MSIE6 and MSIE7 running on the same machine. VMware Workstation, which I use for building and testing MIB Smithy and other Muonics products under multiple platforms from a single machine, came to the rescue here.

After deploying the site, however, I heard some reports and checked our site statistics, where I saw that about 30% of visitors are still using MSIE6–surprisingly high for such a broken browser, but I understand some people may not meet the minimum OS version requirements of MSIE7 yet. For what it’s worth, the site was tested with current versions of MSIE, FireFox and Opera browsers, all of which have sufficient standards support for the earlier CSS to work, and even Lynx to make sure it’s usable (even if it could still stand some improvement for accessibility).

If you notice any other issues, do let me know and I’ll get them fixed them ASAP. Otherwise, I believe there’s just minor nit-picky adjustments to be made, and parts of the redesign that are still under way (such as some new features). Thanks!

Michael Kirkham, President & CEO