Problem: I want the navigation bar across the top of my site to look like tabs, with the currently selected tab in front. This was easy to acheive in Firefox, but IE was a little pesky. For some reason, it was rendering the colors all wrong.

p{text-align:center}. !{border: 1px #ccf solid; margin-right: 15px;} /images/colors-right-ff.png 165×90 (Correct colors rendered in Firefox.)! !{border: 1px #ccf solid;} /images/colors-wrong-ie.png 165×90 (Incorrect colors rendered in Internet Explorer.)!

As it turns out, IE displays PNG images slightly darker than it should (notice my header image is a little darker, too). I explicitly used #003366 in Photoshop when creating the background image, and the background color for the selected tab is also set to #003366 in my CSS file. IE curiously renders the background image as #00295a.

Solution: a quick and dirty fix — save the background as a GIF instead of a PNG. I much rather prefer the PNG format, so if anyone knows of a solution to this odd rendering issue, do tell.

This doesn’t happen very often, but I have a “Google News Alert”:http://www.google.com/newsalerts set up to catch it when it does. “ContentWatch”:http://www.contentwatch.com appeared in an article called [“Safe Surfing”:http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/family/article/0,1299,DRMN_107_3028609,00.html ] on “RockyMountainNews.com”:http://www.rockymountainnews.com.

The article comes in response to the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn a proposed federal law (i.e. the Child Online Protection Act) that would have deemed it illegal for sites to make objectionable material available to minors on the Internet. The law was considered by the court to be unenforcable (they cite that nearly 40% of sites harmful to minors are outside the U.S.), and the recommendation was that parents should use commercially available filtering software.

Now would be a good time to interject with a disclaimer: my opinions are my opinions, and mine alone. I’m not any kind of official spokesman for ContentWatch, so don’t nobody go quoting me on what I’m about to say.

I think this is a fairly well written article, and the quotes they took from our PR guy are pretty good. I especially like the practical stuff at the end about sound parenting.

I get a lot of customer support calls from people who ask me, “Is this thing going to be invisible to my kids?” No, it’s not invisible. You can’t spy on your kids with our product. It’s just not intended to work that way. If I had kids and was considering filtering software, I would sit them down and explain to them why I’m putting the filter on in the first place, and make sure they understand that it is there for their protection.

I’m not sure what I think about it this decision. I suppose I have to agree that filtering is probably going to be more effective than an unenforcable law.

Looking at it another way, though: isn’t it a little hasty to declare a law unenforcable simply because a lot of these sites are outside our nation’s jurisdiction? Can’t we at least prosecute those sites within our borders? Granted, objectionable material will still be available from sites based in other countries, but wouldn’t this send a message to the rest of the world? If America cleans up it’s riff-raff, would other countries follow suit?

Microsoft is going down, and they just don’t get it. I just read a “PCWorld.com”:http://www.pcworld.com article about “browser market share”:http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,116848,00.asp. Apparently, IE has lost 1% of the market, which isn’t much, but it’s the most significant downturn for them since June 2002. The downturn has been attributed to the “US-CERT recommendation”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6746-2004Jun25.html that people stop using IE.

Here’s an excerpt I found particularly asinine:

bq. Microsoft shares its users’ concerns over security and encourages users to “examine all options,” a company spokesman said in an e-mail statement. The company believes that factors such as functionality and manageability, “as well as security backed by the processes and engineering discipline employed by Microsoft,” will convince users that IE is the best choice, he said.

Best choice, my foot! The functionality and manageability of IE pale in comparison to every other browser on the market, and don’t even get me started on security. I’m not sure what “banana truck”:http://images.google.com/images?q=banana+truck Bill Gates fell off of, but if he doesn’t wake up and smell the browser war, he’s toast.

I’ve found my new favorite show. I watched _[“The Amazing Race 5”:http://www.cbs.com/primetime/amazing_race5/]_ last night and loved every minute of it. I’ve seen advertisements for this show many times before and was always mildly interested, but somehow I never got around to watching it. I’m not sure how I missed four whole seasons, but I’m definitely hooked, now.

I’ve never been a big fan of reality TV, since most of it is pure drivel — steamy romance, bickering, foul-mouthed slander, etc. — but this show is clean and has a great premise. Teams compete to see who can be the first to reach various checkpoints. They don’t know where the next checkpoint is until they read a clue found at the current checkpoint. At the end of each episode, they reach a pitstop, where the team in last place gets eliminated, and everyone gets to take a breather.

I’m hoping my brother-in-law will get interested, too. He and I, along with several other family members, had a bracket wager on the third _American Idol_. We’ll have to see about setting up something similar for this show.

I think I’m finally satisfied with the way things look around here. The stock background image in the header is temporary, at least until I can get outside and take some photos. I think I’d like to take a panoramic shot of Salt Lake from Grandeur Peak, the tallest mountain on the east side of the Salt Lake Valley.

There’s still work to be done to make the layout look better in IE. IE doesn’t support the PNG graphics used to create the translucent navigation bar, so instead you’ll get an ugly white thing with unreadable text. I’m researching hacks that might work to trick IE into rendering something a little more readable, but in the meantime, why not download a “superior browser”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox?

Comments, questions, glaring inconsistencies? Post ’em here. Thanks.