hamilton.likes.to.draw...

i still PREFER maxthon. i just like it in so many ways. but on the house computer, which is really karl's computer and the one i use most now, there are a bunch of restrictions on ie's security set. it didn't take much time to learn that those restrictions made surfing a pain, and that firefox had no such restrictions. so i quickly learned all about the best firefox extensions, and now it's what i use. i'm not entirely sure what browser i'll use when i get my own computer again.

but the point is, mainly if you write good css, the two browsers will render pages the same. there are only a few things that differ. not that one is better necessarily. just some differences. for one thing IE does not recognize a div with auto margins, and firefox will not center a div in a container that has text-align:center; so you have to use both techniques.

but the most notorious difference, and you can make an argument for both ways, is that firefox considers the border as exterior to the width of a container, and IE considers it interior. what does this mean? if i have a 1 pixel border, it really doesn't mean anything, but if i make that border 3 pixels, suddenly i've got a six pixel swing in the two browsers. that's a lot, actually. so if i have two boxes that are floated to opposite sides, and they have 5 pixels space between them, firefox will render them fine, but IE will push the boxes together and render one beneath the other. i could add 6 pixels to the width, but then firefox would have a huge gap. it's annoying. i've grown to love both browsers, and possibly when IE7 comes out, all our problems will be over. but for now, it's not so much that one is better than the other, it's just that they're both different in the most annoying ways.

why am i talking about browsers and stylesheets again? because i just made a nice little design on my homepage. it just reads in my livejournal feed for now, but at least there's something in there again. and oh yeah, have fun rolling over those headers. :)