Ok, so I’ve worked through a heap of design and css and code and stuff in the past few weeks while I tried to make sense of the BTS process in oscMax.

I had a test site layout done and was working through some minor details using Chrome as my preferred browser when it occurred to me that I had not looked at it with Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Results? Yep, Firefox was identical to Chrome and Internet Explorer broke it completely.

So since IE version whatever it was 10 years ago to the latest version 9 we still cannot just design a page or a site template. We must do crazy extra work to address the very special Microsoft interpretation of web standards in HTML and CSS.

Just to make sure it was not just me, I have run up an oscMax site with the Compromise template that it was claimed took an oscMax guru just 15 minutes to convert from an open source CSS theme into oscMax. That 15 minutes would be great except that in Internet Explorer 9 the design does not work.

Whats this blog entry really about? Just noting the fact that regardless of any special template system in oscMax or of how ‘easy’ creating a template may be, there is still the issue of many hours being consumed in design to cater for the variety of web browsers that potential oscMax store visitors will use.

Creating templates for oscMax is just as complex as for any other site.

Update: I figured that this link may come in handy for IE version comparison from MSDN