So I’ve gone and updated the site. Now it uses (part of) the new ComicPress 2.5 theme, as well as all of the old stuff I’d added before.

NOTE: I’m in serious need of feedback here, don’t be shy with the comments, and don’t feel like you need to be kind either!

Hit the jump for a gripping tale of man’s fight against technology. Weep with me as I recount my struggle to live in A World Without Standards.

I also bit the bullet and installed Opera and Safari in my computer, which means that the new design has been tested in all five major browsers (the others being Firefox, IE7 and that old bastard IE6 that refuses to die). Alas, that it’s tested in all of them doesn’t mean that it works in all of them. Safari users, please excuse for the moment the displaced shadow, I’m working on it. IE6 users… I don’t know where to begin. Anyways, if you’re still using IE6 (the year: 2008…), you probably have worse problems to worry about. Surprisingly, though there are a lot of little defects in IE6, it still looks better than Safari (then again, I devoted a LOT of time to IE6 and very little to Safari so far).

Would you be surprised to know that each one of these browsers has quirks that don’t appear in the rest? Well, if you’re a developer, then perhaps no. Anyways, through a lot of work I managed a while ago to get IE7 and Firefox to show almost exactly the same things. I’m talking pixel-perfect here. IE6 now, that’s a different story. It took days of excruciatingly minute work (a pixel more here… a pixel less there) to get it to render more or less the same as it younger brother.

In the end I was unable to get pixel-perfect similitude between IE6 and IE7, but it’s really close, so much that you probably wouldn’t notice without checking them side by side (or, huh, checking IE6 and any other browser side by side). So I’m calling it a day here. Close enough for me.

Opera and Safari rendered almost perfectly from the beginning. In fact the differences, at first, only highlighted flaws in my design that the other trio of browsers were glossing over. So I corrected them and was a happy person.

And then I started to notice that there were minute differences between all of them. The text area for comments was too big in all of them except Firefox. That forced me to look for a Firefox-only CSS hack, which I didn’t even know how to do (if you’re wondering, search “firefox specific css hack” - it works). And then, I realized everything was almost perfect except for Safari displacing the drop shadow on the right column. Now, I haven’t been able to fix this. Part of the problem is that the Safari-specific hack I found works, but somehow Opera picks it up as well. I have no idea why Opera and Safari seem to work the same way for everything except this. If I fixed it for Safari, it would break for Opera. So right now I’m leaving it as it is while I look for a solution (if you can help me, I’d appreciate it).

On a side note, what is up with the font rendering in Safari? I don’t want to get into the unholy war that is Apple vs Windows, but damn… blurry text is blurry. I use Cleartype here, which softens the fonts as well, but this is ridiculous. Anyways… if you are reading this in Safari and feel happy with the font-rendering you’re getting… more power to you, I guess.

Oh, I also made the comics bigger. 31% bigger in fact. Enjoy!