I have spent few days adding new features to Starscape, and I managed to make theme work in Safari, Opera, Firefox and IE7. But now I am trying to sort things out with IE6 and a lot of things are still the problem. This blog now runs on latest internal beta version of Starscape 1.10. As you can see there are a lot of new features, soon to be available for public use.

There are two main problems with IE6: PNG and Box Model.

First problem was PNG transparency. My idea was to have semi transparent menu, logo with full transparency, png icons. But fixing all this in IE6 is a big problem. I had to rewrite some parts of the code (top menu) and use tables instead of divs. All IE6 PNGFix solutions have the same problem: you can’t use transparent images as a tile in the div background. Only one repetition is allowed.

After I managed to fix this, next problem was infamous box model IE6 uses. Even IE7 has some problems with box model, but there it was much easier to fix. There is no real universal solution to this. I don’t like using hacks much, and I tried to replace css declarations for some classes and ids to compensate for box model issues in IE6. 5 pixels here, 5 pixels there, and I managed to make it work!

Now Starscape is fully compatible with: Opera 9.x, Firefox 2.x, Firefox 3, Safari for Windows 3, IE6, IE7. Once I release Starscape 1.1.0, you can try it with some of the other browsers and see if there are some new problems I wasn’t aware at the moment.