Why does this page look so terrible?

If you were linked here, you're running Internet Explorer under some version of Windows, and as a result, parts of this site will not render or behave properly. Why is that? Did I do something wrong? Sadly, no. Please note that all of the code on this site is 100% XHTML and CSS compliant, according to the World Wide Web consortium's code validators. There are three main reasons this site doesn't look right in any version of IE for Windows:

• IE/Win does not support PNG images with alpha transparency channels;
• IE/Win does not fully understand CSS element and image positioning;
• And IE/Win does not support CSS :hover psuedo-classes in anything other than inline anchor elements.

This link to this message only appears for IE/Win users because of a long-standing bug in the way IE (mis)handles the !important rule, for example.

"So don't use that stuff!" you say. Well, I hate to break the news, but these things aren't bleeding edge anymore; transparent PNGs are a good decade old, and the CSS1 and CSS2.x standards are getting pretty old, as well. It seems that the developers at Microsoft (or perhaps, more likely, the managers, since I honestly believe Microsoft hires bright engineers) are simply unwilling to bring IE up to speed with the rest of the WWW.

All of the content here is visible in IE/Win, but the layout is broken, and I have no intent of trying to hack it to work in non-compliant browsers. I would rather write clean, standards-compliant code than bend over backwards for the special child of the WWW.

I seriously recommend you and all of your friends check out browsers such as Firefox and Opera, and ditch the non-compliance and security holes of the past decade.

-mikey