Congratulations Microsoft...

...You've given yet another burgeoning web developer the motivation to gouge out his own kneecaps with a spoon ("...because it's dull, you twit; it'll hurt more." God bless you Alan Rickman). IE never ceases to amaze me with its blatant disregard of web standards set forth by the W3C, in particular of CSS. As any aspiring web developer/designer can tell you, working with CSS in IE requires an inane amount of workarounds, "fixes," and hair-pulling. God bless Firefox.

Now we have IE7, or rather an early beta. Mind you, it's a closed MSDN release, instead of the promised public beta. I haven't been able to get my hands on it just yet, but it appears that, surprise surprise, its CSS compliance is still shot to hell. You've had four years since IE6, Microsoft. FOUR YEARS. Four years of complaints about non-compliance with web standards. Four years of bitching and moaning. Well, IE7 gives us proper PNG alpha support, I'll give you that. But... FOUR FUCKING YEARS. I long for the day Firefox finally catches up to, nay, overtakes, IE.

"Our goal is to get feedback from this group, do a bunch more work around quality (performance, security, reliability, etc.) and some features (e.g. additional standards support beyond what’s in beta 1, additional functionality around tabs and RSS, etc.), and release Beta 2 much more broadly."
-Dean, in the IE7b1 release announcement

Again I stress: FOUR YEARS. You'll pardon me if that sounds like a horseshit attempt to appease developers while they sit on their collective asses and twiddle their thumbs. Arrogant fucks.

That said, I should have my portfolio site up by sometime tomorrow. The layout is pretty much done, aside from an image-alignment issue with IE (shock and horror), and a good chunk of the PHP is done. I've managed to get by without MySQL, and to be honest, I don't know that I'll need it just yet, given the size of the site. Thankfully it shouldn't be too much of a headache to rewrite the required sections of code to accommodate that should the time come.

Now back to the kneecap gouging.