Internet Explorer
Building web sites is more enjoyable to me now thanks to team, tools, process and more capable browsers. I really enjoy my work.
I have a confession to make, I don’t care much for Internet Explorer.
I want my work to be as enjoyable as possible, I create better things that way and will live longer.
An enjoyable day of work is:
not having to wake up to an alarm
espresso
a casual ride along the Yarra
friendly faces
good music
good food
learning something new
working with well designed things
working with @wernah designed things
having machines work for you
solving a problem
deleting code
not wasting time
This is what my average day looks like and it’s lovely. I work on a macbook pro with Ruby, Rails, Sass & Compass, CoffeeScript and excellent browsers i.e. Tools and frameworks that make me happy and keep me from repeating myself. Programs and machines do the repetitive things far better than me so I let them and then thank them for their efforts, praising them to my fellow humans.
I’ve been consciously working on removing things from my workflow that aren’t pleasant or enjoyable. I have no time for things that require too much effort to achieve too little. I want to get as much done as a I can with as little effort, and I want to enjoy doing it too.
I suppose this is why I never open up Windows, though I am interested in IE10 and Windows 8.
All of my development work is done in Firefox and Chrome. When I release something, most of the time I will open up a VM with IE8 and 9 with the aim of making it work and then getting the hell out of there.
zoom: 1, position: relative or float: left will fix things in IE.
Learn about “hasLayout”, it will help you get out of there sooner.
If it’s CSS3 that’s difficult to provide a fallback for, take a deep breath and throw a PIE at it. Seriously.
With Sass and Compass you simply include it on the problematic elements and Boom, Chris Eppstein, Jason Johnston, thank you.
.hawt-element {
@include pie;
}I use shims and poly-fills cautiously but I have no problem throwing these types of scripted band-aids at Internet Explorer, it throws off the feng shui in my zen garden.