Internet Explorer... A whole nother can of worms.
I recently got a chance to test my site on IE8 (I was running Windows 7 Beta in a VM; an interesting experience). I half expected it to display correctly; it is a recent browser, after all... Well, I should have known better. It seems IE8 (and I should think it's predecessors also) don't handle relative links as one would expect (and as many other browsers do). Rather than reading a given link (say '../images/background.jpg') as relative from the css file it is called in, it reads it as relative from the document that's being displayed. After discovering this, I quickly made all my urls absolute--from the server root (eg '/main/images/background.jpg')--including the links to my css files (just in case).
Ok, one problem solved; IE can now definitely see my css files and the images they link to... But there's still a problem; All my pages are black and white (save for the background, which now has an image). Ah, well this one was simple... Internet Explorer can't yet handle hsl() or hsla() as color values. It sucks, but I had to add fallback simpler colors for browsers which can't handle hsl(); that, or remove any keyword colors and replace them with hsl() and leave any browser which doesn't support it with a plain page. Why can't I leave the keywords if I don't put the fallbacks? Because then some text will be colored while other text isn't, and some backgrounds will be colored and others won't, which will cause problems with text readibility (For instance, black text on a black background).
Basically what I did was add 'background:navy;' before any 'background:[hsl color resembling navy];'. IE will be able to read the first one, navy, and when it gets to the second one it will just ignore it. Any browsers which support hsl() will read override the navy with the hsl value and display that instead. Thus, my website is once again compatible with the weird and already dated IE8 browser, and any other browsers which don't yet implement the css I use. ^.^
btw, if you're ever tired of my style, or if it takes too long for the page to load, or for whatever other reason you may have, you can view my page with (basically) no style by clicking on 'View' and going into 'Page Style' and clicking 'No Style' (on Firefox, anyway). It actually looks ok. I'll be adding alternate styles in the future too--dark styles, bright styles, red styles, no background styles, etc.. Not that you would be interested, but I thought I'd put it out there anyway. When I do, I'll probably post here. In the mean-time, enjoy the page in all it's IE glory... or not! ;)
