Okay, so here's my latest problem: The above screen shot is the way this weblog is supposed to look…with blue bars on either side. And from what I can determine, it looked this way to about 97% of you if you came by here in the last week or so. For some reason though, about 3% of you were seeing it without the white in this area. The blue background was showing through, making the text difficult to read.
I did all the necessary tests and validations and everything told me I had it all configured properly and that shouldn't happen. But it did. I got a lot of distressed e-mails from folks who thought I'd put black text over a dark blue (at top) background because I wanted it to be close to illegible. Stumped, I finally e-mailed a friend who's supposed to be an expert at this kind of thing. The reply I got him from said, in part…
There's nothing wrong with your CSS. It all validates fine. The problem is that 3% of your users are using browsers they shouldn't be using. Most of them are probably old and incapable of reading modern CSS coding. They may not realize it but they're missing a lot of things on the internet and in the next year or so as more and more sites abandon old coding and deprecated tags, those browsers may not be able to read most sites at all. A few of them are probably also using one of the dreadful recent browsers for the Mac that don't know how to handle some basic commands. I don't know why they did that but one of them can't even read the friggin' Time magazine site. Tell those people to upgrade for their own sake or go find some other site to read.
And the trouble with that advice is that as some of the 3% have written to me, they can't upgrade that easily. Usually, the stated reason is that they're on very old computers and can't afford at this time to upgrade their hardware…and the old hardware won't run new software.
Well, I've decided that before I give up on that 3%, I'm going to fiddle with the software here. The difficulty is that since none of my three computers or my iPad or my iPhone sees the "problem," I have no way of knowing if anything I do fixes it.
I have replaced the blue background with yellow for the moment. I'm going to eventually go back to it but for now, yellow is in its place. So anyone who had the problem of the blue showing through is, at worst, now reading this over yellow so it should at least be legible. I'm going to be fiddling over the next week or two when I have the time. If you had the problem and anything I do causes white to appear in this space instead of yellow, please drop me a line and let me know. Thanks.