A Message to Internet Explorer Users

If you are using Internet Explorer, you will notice the following rendering errors:

• Images Have foggy Background Images have grey, white or black backgrounds instead of transparent backgrounds because Internet Explorer does not render PNG images correctly. Microsoft has noted this bug (confer MS-KB 294714), but has not fixed it since it appeared in IE 4.0. The AlphaImageLoader kludge is not a solution since it would break every other browser and does not function correctly across major versions of IE.
  Update: Thanks to ImageMagick, I have found a way to force the image background to be white (or any colour I choose) and still be transparent under normal browsers. This at least allow images to be viewed. (Sometimes images had black text on a black background.)
• The navigation menus are huge. The menu floating on the left will span the entire screen and shove all the content down.
• PNG FavIcons The favicons, or shortcut icons were originally an invention of Internet Explorer to display custom icons on web sites. It seems, however, that IE will only accept favicons in Windows ICO format, which is limited, only allow 16 (4-bit) or 256 (8-bit) colour and a mere 1-bit transparency instead of PNG's 16,777,216 (24-bit) colours with 8-bit alpha transparency.
• Non-Centred Tables The tables in most pages are supposed to have equal space on either side, but under IE, they will remain left justified. Update: This seems to work under IE 6+.
• Funny Spacing There is all kinds of space around the rulers in the menu on the introduction page. There are other nit-picky spacing errors, but I have tried to avoid spacing sensitive content.

I do not intend to fix there errors because they only appear under Internet Explorer. The HTML code that generates them follows the World Wide Web Consortium's specifications and renders correctly under a other browsers I have tested. This leads me to believe the problems are with IE and not my problems to fix.

Although IE has some 95+% of the browser market, I refuse to cater to its bugs. I'm not going to suggest that you switch to another browser, but if you do, I think you'll be surprised at its speed, and features like pop up blocking.

I have personally tested these pages and had success on:

• Konqueror (This is my default browser. Apple's Safari is based on Konqueror and, although modified, it should perform similarly.)
• Gecko (specifically Mozilla, Netscape & FireFox, but Camino, Galeon and other Gecko-derived browsers should work.)
• Lynx (Well, success for a text-based browser. Obviously, images and colours do not display.)
• Opera

Not that they are prefect. For instance, both Konqueror and Gecko smush paragraphs and tables with space on the left against the menu. However, these are minor irritations and do not affect overall content presentation.