surely consider myself to be pretty well-based.

That being said, the recent buzz amongst my fellow designers has been about the latest browser releases and what it means for our current and future web projects. At first, we found ourselves cheerfully commenting about some of the brilliant updates Mozilla made to their upcoming Firefox 3 browser. Safari and Opera have surely been kind, and for the most part all of our designs kept their intended form. Then came Internet Explorer 8. I'll start on a positive note and say that it's good to hear that they are attempting to focus more on the standards in this new release. However, it's sickening to see how horrible of a job they did. Of course this isn't considered to be news of any sort, but rather an extension to the ongoing disappointment that Microsoft poses to the web community.

It's a fact, most developers vomit when they see people click on IE. Personally I hide every noobie locatable trace of it when I'm summoned for computer repair. Many designers suggest that Microsoft's constant disappointment is a conspiracy and that they are attempting to level the internet with their own software and standards. Why else would they try to purchase Yahoo? Chances are, it would work to their advantage, assuming they had enough cheddar on the table, but its more than foolish to think that this will allow them to compete eye to eye with Google. Free and open will always reign, innovation cannot be forced, or marked with a price. Microsoft doesn't know what free or open is, nor would they figure out how to survive in that market without a complete attitude readjustment.

So why is this an issue? The World Wide Web Consortium since the beginning of the internet has set standards with the good and overall quality of web page rendering in mind. The fact is that all of the major browsers with the exception of Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 follow those rules pretty closely. So why are they the only ones that truly suck? Well, I refuse to believe that Microsoft as a corporation isn't capable of adhering to these standards, but there is a very good chance that they are far too arrogant to recognize them. Microsoft would much rather push their own agenda, rip off someone else's idea, and throw their own branding on it. Silverlight? Are you kidding me? If a browser that can't follow the same rules that everyone else follows doesn't turn you off completely perhaps the repulsively unnecessary amounts of memory that Internet Explorer robs you of (which is depicted on the image on this article at pavlov.net) will.

Just keep in mind (as unfortunate as it may be) that respected designers don't forget to test with IE, and they never, ever, forget to close it when they are done.

that I didn't want 1 or 100 of them for my own archives. The truth however is that being on top of your web typography game is not as hard as you think. You can draw attention to our boring or even grammarless text, and on top of that you can do it with the very fonts that had marked as a complete eyesore in the past. Yes that's right i'm referring to Times New Roman, Georgia, and Helvetica.

Sometimes having a tiny square font is the cool thing to do, but the issue of course is making the user see the same thing that you do without turning every paragraph into an image or embedding a font. By sticking to fonts that look similar if not exactly the same on Firefox, Opera, Safari, and even Internet Explorer, you can be sure that your users experience will not vary.