the tennis ball hack
There are times when you wish there was a clean, elegant way to go about a thing and there are times, as we all know, when this just isn’t possible. Such, is my state of mind at present. We all know what it’s like to take something that is beautiful and clean, and have to bend and contort it to work in environments it really shouldn’t be subjected to. Such is the peril of the web designer and developer. And such is the profound necessity of standards.
In times like this, I can’t help but wish we, as designers and developers, had something for our practice, akin to the good old tennis ball hack.
Without a doubt, I’m ranting about Internet Explorer. I know, it’s a tiresome subject, but we, nevertheless, exhaust countless, valuable hours contending with the legacy Microsoft left behind.
I won’t blame Microsoft, entirely, for the recent neglect I’ve shown this blog. I’ve been buried in the final preparations, for the launch of the colossal project I’ve been working on for the past months. At the end of this stretch, starting in October of last year, and after roughly a dozen meetings and 160 odd, independent email strings, I think it’s understandable how spending the last 5 hours and 15 minutes trying to figure out why Internet Explorer would not except ‘click’ events and in the end discovering a simple switch to a ‘mousedown’ event worked fine, had me little feathers, a wee bit ruffled.
Don’t get me wrong, I was ready to cry like a little girl when I happened upon this senseless solution, but I’m not the type to easily let things go, not understood. So is life with IE.
The funny thing in all this, is I couldn’t stop thinking about the brilliance of the tennis ball hack and how wonderful it would be for us developers facing off with Internet Explorer, if we had a similar, beautiful solution to IE short comings. The fact, however, is that we are the tennis balls to the IE walker, in this equation.
Unlike our gainful pursuits in web standards, the tennis ball hack has not enjoyed the same glint on the horizon. In fact, rather than improve the design of the walker, as to not require the cannibalized tennis ball, companies have bloomed to capitalize on this age old hack and take something away from the masses and a stab at the beauty of accessibility.
Alas, the parallels with Internet Explorer and the web design community are uncanny. I digress. It’s a beautiful, chilly day in San Francisco and I am off to try to catch the end of Preemptive Media’s presentation on Air, at Southern Exposure. Enjoy the weekend, and if you have a chance, pick up a can of tennis balls just for fun. You never know when you might need to erase black scuff marks from the tile or rescue your keys from inside your locked car.
I agree: if only there was a means as eloquent as the tennis ball hack to dealing with the perils of IE6 bad behavior. Alas, no hack is so stylish as the tennis ball on the end of a walker. Learning from Las Vegas anyone?
Nonetheless, I do have to counter your insinuation here though:
As a (former?) little girl myself, we don’t cry and let things go. We fight like banshees and get a shot of Jameson to wash down our tears later….