Amas-Veritas.com

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It's always been a no-brainer to me..."use MSIE". Lately though, IE of any version has just been a pain in my side. Our company website that we had from about 2007 to 2009 was a product of my own design. I hand coded EVERYTHING, short of the Joomla login and access control. I did all of my greatest learning and work (PHP) on that site. It wasn't flawless but it worked well and it was unique to our agency. When we started working with a marketing company around September 2009, I decided to merge the whole site with Joomla (which caused me to need and find the awesome plugin Sourcerer) as well as make it blend seamlessly with our "new" marketing site. I used their template on my site (with permission) and using Sourcer, started moving all of my HTML, forms, and PHP over to Joomla.

About 4 pages into the process, I noticed the site would shut doown (IE would literally close on me) whenever I logged into the frontend. I read up on the problem and it talked about parent and child references and I assumed there was a glitch in my HTML or PHP. So, after getting frustrated with it, oh and by the way, the site only broke in IE, it worked just fine in Firefox, I decided I would validate the code (XHTML 1.0 Strict). This was only an issue because I was now using a template that I didn't design and when I removed all the things that weren't "XHTML Strict" I needed the site to look the same. I worked for about an hour and decided XHTML 1.0 Transitional would have to be good enough..."Strict" was a little TOO strict. Sure, I learned some things, like instead of using align="center" in your html you can use margin: 0 auto; in your style sheet to produce the same effect. I didn't, however, fix the whole shutting down thing, even after the site was "validated".

I read more into the problem on microsoft.com and realized the problem actually had to do with javascript within the code changing a partent element from within a child element. And since I didn't HAVE any javascript withing MY code, I knew it was either Joomla or my marketing company's template that brought on the error. Since, again, Joomla works on all my other sites, including this one, without a hitch, I knew the only option left was the darn template. I commented out the template's only javascript and presto! Problem solved. I had to do a work around and turn their SWF file into just a regular graphic, but after that, no more IE errors.

Moral of this story: USE FIREFOX! Enough said.