One thing that angered me about Safari 3.1 was its @font-face support. This allows developers to load fonts that may not already be on someone’s computer and use them anywhere in the site. This could be a totally awesome tool, however, I thought, “Why the hell is Safari trying to become IE?”

What do I mean by that statement. Well, the reason the IE sucks to develop for is because it is too busy trying to support older websites that don’t gracefully degrade. The developers were too busy trying to get the site to work in a patched together browser, so standards weren’t followed. This comes from the fact that IE attempted to create it own standard (as did Netscape) because they were all attempting to monopolize the internet.

Anyway, so we have Safari attempting to, in my view, add its own specification to CSS. Turns out I’m wrong. The @font-face selector is actually a part of the CSS3 spec. However, CSS3 is not fully “approved” even though it is supported. I’m not really sure how that works, but I’d really like to see some definite approval before we see support.

So I guess @font-face is all good. Soon we’ll be seeing websites in font other than Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, Georgia, Times, and fantasy? Almost. Turns out you have to host the font files on your server, in a readable directory, so you can’t put up commercial fonts because all users will have to do is read your CSS (thanks Firebug!) and navigate to the font file and download it. Not good. So we are stuck with Open Type fonts. Which can be good, and are getting better, but they’re no Din.

But wait there’s more! You can load other fonts with this handy little tool known as sFIR. sFIR is awesome because it replaces your headings with Flash files that have the font’s embedded. It gracefully degrades (if someone doesn’t have Flash, they get the heading in your default font style). It also has limitations. sFIR is no intended to be used for mainbody text, only small chunks, like headings. And the person needs Flash (who doesn’t have it now-a-days?).

For more on @font-face and how it works, check out this @font-font explanation.

I have to admit that having a blog and wanting to write well researched and thoughtful articles has really contributed to this. I’m still brewing my last critique of Safari 3.1, and in the process of doing research around this have discovered quite a bit of cool stuff (by the way, my writing still sucks, I use words like stuff too much). So I thought I would list a few way to deal with IE issues.

1. Eric Meyer is the man, and give us this bit of code to break some of the major issues you will run into with IE. You can see them at his Reset Reloaded article, which I found on this webiste, Keys to Consistent CSS. Here’s the code in case you are too lazy:
html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0;
outline: 0;
font-weight: inherit;
font-style: inherit;
font-size: 100%;
font-family: inherit;
vertical-align: baseline;
}
/* remember to define focus styles! */
:focus {
outline: 0;
}
body {
line-height: 1;
color: black;
background: white;
}
ol, ul {
list-style: none;
}
/* tables still need 'cellspacing="0"' in the markup */
table {
border-collapse: separate;
border-spacing: 0;
}
caption, th, td {
text-align: left;
font-weight: normal;
}
blockquote:before, blockquote:after,
q:before, q:after {
content: "";
}
blockquote, q {
quotes: "" "";
}


   ******Update*******

   The above is the old version of the reset. Eric Meyer has a new version of the browser reset, posted Jan ’08.

2. Another great resource is Dean Edwards IE7 JavaScript library, which fools anything less than IE7 into thinking its IE7. Initially I thought this was awesome. Then I realized it made me lazy. Then I thought it was too big. Now I’m so good, I don’t need it (which is partially true). Version 2 has gotten much smaller, but is still in Beta.
3. Hacks. As much as I love them, they create invalid CSS. You can use _ before your propertiess to target IE6, and * before them to target IE7 (which also targets IE6 by the way), or both to create properties that affect both:
   
/* Target IE 6 and below*/
#maincontent {
width: 400px;
_width: 410px;
}
/* Target IE7 and below */
#maincontent {
width: 400px;
*width: 410px;
}
/* Target IE6 and IE7 separately. ***Make sure to put the IE6 ("_") property second*** */
#maincontent {
width: 400px;
*width: 410px;
_width: 415px;
}

   Let me be absolutely clear, I do not endorse hacks, but I have been known to use them in a pinch (a fact that I am not proud of).
4. And here’s my preferred method, Conditional Comments, which you can use to have specific stylesheets for different browsers. Make sure you put these after your global stylesheet(s) so they properly override the styles.