patrick

Yes, it is IEs or Internet Explorers.

The trend of tableless site design is significantly growing. The idea behind this concept is you'll use CSS to determine the width and height of our pseudo-"tables". However, it is not a secret that CSS is not consistent across browsers and it depresses developers (and site designers as well) that a site does not appear the way it should be.

If you are currently using IE7, chances are, your site might not behave correctly on IE6 (or for any browser for that matter). There are circulating information over the internet how to tweak using IE6 and IE7 side by side in a single machine. Some of these include various changes in the registry and other miscellaneous stuff. Since we started deploying our site (PEP), we understand that majority of our target audience uses IE as their primary browser and there will be differences from our development machine as we are using Firefox being more "standards" compliant than IE.

So as not to compromise the site design (knowing the fact that site content is secondary to aesthetics), we installed this 10.6 mb file download that enables us to install multiple versions of IE (even up to IE 3.0). Just imagine you have IE versions from 3.0 to 7.0. It's not that we're keeping this program as "secret" but I still find some people asking for ways on how to test their site on IE6 when IE7 is installed in their machines. So I guess, if you are more concerned on how your site will look on different browsers, this program is a good shot!

Of course, the program is not perfect; the older browsers doesn't load sites from the internet but load sites from your local IIS/Apache webservers. As far as we our concerned, the only issue that we found by using this program is that the we cannot retrieve fully the cookie information that we have set by loading the site.

If you want to check this, download the program from Tredosoft.

Happy coding!

I am now breaking my blogging "virginity" here at DevPinoy . Before everything else, let me introduce myself and a bit of history about my programming life.

I'm Patrick, a web programmer here in the Philippines. I already heard DevPinoy while I am still studying although I'm a bit hesitant at joining since I thought it would be a ".NET world" in here and that word was nowhere in our college vocabulary. My first encounter with .NET was last 2004 when I got a free entrance to Microsoft Philippines' Devdays 2004. I must admit that back then, I was an open source zealot attending to a Microsoft event where deep inside myself, I am laughing or countering anything that they talk about particularly in security. Nonetheless, that event triggered my "thirst" for knowledge and from there I started studying .NET (even if the school doesn't teach it).

My exposure to .NET grew very much when I started working for Microsoft Philippines as an Academic Developer Evangelist. While my primary language for web development is PHP, I began to like and to favor more ASP.NET not just because my work demands for it but for myself, I have realized that it's much more better (based on my personal metrics on what a web technology should be). Although because for some reasons that I can't disclose, I left the company for a more technical role in a different company. Right now, I am working as a web developer for GMA NMI, a subsidiary of GMA Network, Inc.. My first yet a very large project with them is the Philippine Entertainment Portal. Although it is not a .NET house, I will be soon having my own .NET project, according to my manager, and still it would be for the web.

So I guess I'll end my story here and I'll try to be more active in blogging about technology. This isn't my first blog at all; in fact this is my fifth blog - I ceased to use the first one, I abandoned the second one, I have stalled using the third one, I am maintaning the fourth one and this is the fifth. I'll share here sometimes stuff about the web particularly in AJAX, PHP, and ASP.NET.

That's all for now and I'll switch now to the coding window.

Patrick