I discovered the problem with IE was that it was not handling the CSS float on the left column correctly. By supplying explicit top margin settings, it is now usable. Here’s what the design looks like in IE:

As you can see, the corners are square since it doesn’t understand CSS3 border-radius. I may go back later and do the graphic based rounding, but it’s so much more trouble than CSS. At least the tabs are accessible now. You may note if you look closely, that the top of the first post is no ligned up with the top of the sidebar… I’m going to have to fix that. I just noticed it as I took this screen shot. Here’s how it should look in Firefox:

Much nicer if I do say so myself! I decided to change the background to the entire page to the dark green rather than the light green with dark borders. The light green seemed to be giving the tan background a greenish cast visually. I know it’s just my eyes due to the colors being adjacent, but I didn’t like it. I’m still not quite happy with the shade of the tan I’m using, but I’m working on it. My target is something I would call ’sand’. Mary Carter at eFuse has written a nice description of the adjacent color phenomenon.

I’ve also made a change in how the <code>blocks will appear:

Using CSS the property overflow: auto, I’m able to let wide sections scroll, while the narrower ones don’t have scroll bars. If you use overflow: visible, it will show scroll bars even when they are not needed. Auto works much nicer. I’ve changed the background color as well as set the font to monospace for <code> as well.

Finally, I customized the footer, giving myself credit for the theme! I’m calling it ‘Earthy’. Tweaked the spacing at the bottom as well to not waste so much space.

Behind the scenes, I also tweaked the Feeds to exclusively use my FeedBurner account so my statistics stay correct, as well as offering all three kinds of major feeds, RSS, RSS2 & Atom. Plus a Comments Feed.

Next step is replicating any specifics to the auxiliary pages, like the single post display & archives. Then the selection of plugins & configuration should be all that is left!

After reading Eric Meyer’s post, Reworked Reset, and it’s predecessor, Reset Styles, and his follow-up explanation of some of his choices, Reset Reasoning, I thought I may have a clue as to my troubles with the new template design. I should have known all this, but having been rusty in doing original design work, I had forgotten this basic practice. Learn it now! It will save your sanity someday.

However, my problem remains with the IE weirdness. The reset CSS made a few things more consistent, but the strange desire for IE to want to position itself differently is still unexplained. The post overlaps the tabs, and the sidebar seems to be intermittent.

I think I just found a clue! In looking at IE, I realized it’s default page looked strange… the graphics were all jaggy, like they had been enlarged improperly. I thought about it a minute, and decided to check my screen resolution settings. While the screen is normally at 1600×1200 (it’s a 20″ flat panel), the dpi resolution was set at 125% or 120dpi for larger fonts! I’m suspecting that the jaggy images was being caused by this. I’ve reset it, but it needs a system restart to enable, so I’m going to pause here and do that so I can report my findings… hang on!

Oh, well. Restart didn’t help… the fonts were already more normal sized before the restart, but the graphic problem was fixed at least. My overlap problem remains:

Must be something else in IE that is effecting it. This will be one of those battles I don’t want to fight, but can’t ignore. It’s just too obvious, and my target audience is expecting perfection. Or at least nothing as obviously wrong as this. I can live without the rounded corners, but not this. It is a functionality issue also, as it is difficult to get to the tab links. We’ll dig into this first thing in the morning with a fresh cup of coffee in hand!