So after doing a ton of work on the storefront, I figure it’s about time to check it in various browsers.

I had bee working with Dreamweaver as the design tool, in Max OSX, and I have parallel and Windows 7 installed, though I haven’t used either in many months; and the only reason would be to see what stuff looks like in Widows IE and Windows FF.

As Parallel is starting up, I get an error message saying something is wrong with Windows, and asking if I want to repair it.  If I do repair it, the message warns me, then any changes that are made cannot be rolled back.  It’s true, that I have a mirror image of the all the drives, but still, why should I have to fix something that I haven’t touched in three months.

I’m mumbling to myself, this just ain’t right.  This just ain’t right.  When suddenly the black box with the message goes away and it says, repair cancelled, and another box pops up, with a few dots and some more messages, and then suddenly I find myself in Windows 7.

The first thing it asks is whether I want to upgrade to windows 8?  I think it was 8.  With a few things that will be useful to me if I upgrade.  But frankly, I just want to see what the cosmetic changes in the store look like.  And sure enough, right next to the LOGO (upper left-hand corner) their is a middle blac empty rectangle.

So this is new. I haven’t seen it in all the time I’ve been designing in mac environment.  It wasn’t in Mac Firefox, and it wasn’t in Mac Safari, and it wasn’t even in Safari on the iPhone.

What the f*** is goin’ on.  This just ain’t freakin’ right.

I know where the black background is coming from.  there’s a table (yeah, I know, don’t use tables, use CSS) but sometimes tables are easier to maintain, and so it’s a table with three columns, and the cells are all marked to have a background color of white.  There is also some CSS around the table but that also tells the background to be white.  In fact, just about every freakin’ thing, in every little bit of code I can find is tellin’ the background to be white.

I take it one step further and do a regular expression search for * (anything) that points to #000 or #00000 (black).  Nothing to be found.

Well, I’m too tired to try to ponder it out now.  But there you have it.  Just amazing what MS manages to do.  And it does look so nice in Mac Firefox…  or if not “so nice” it looks homey and sophisticated at the same time and simple to use.  I’ve got a gray bar going across the screen that has my promotion about shipping about it (that doesn’t move) but sits there like I want it to while you do your scrolling.  The categories and the pages on the top and bottom are both done with a nice CSS  menu plugin.  All in all – easy to maintain.  Now to find out where that black space is coming from.

AFTER ALL THESE YEARS WITH CASCADING STYLE SHEETS, HOW IS IT POSSIBLE THAT THE MAJOR COMPANIES CAN’T AGREE ON HOW THEY SHOULD WORK, AND WHAT THEY SHOULD DO WHEN INCORRECT CODE IS USED.  I SUPPOSE THAT ONE DAY I’LL WAKE UP ON AND READ THAT THE FDA HAS OUTLAWED POT FOR MEDICAL PURPOSES AND THE REST OF THE WORLD HAS OKAYED IT’S USE FOR MEDICAL REASONS.  Naw… that couldn’t happen… could it.  No freakin’ way.