OK, I’m getting fed up of all this Internet Explorer crap. As you know, Potassium does NOT support IE6. However, my first upcoming WordPress theme and a slight handful of my future themes will support IE6, and all future themes from my birthday ‘08 will not support IE6.

Now to rant about my tag cloud and IE’s job of messing it up.

Apparently WordPress 2.3’s tag system changes all whitespace in tags to non-breaking spaces  . I don’t know why WordPress 2.3 developers chose to do that, but unless it’s considered a defect worth rectifying, I can’t do anything about it except hack WordPress on my own (which I’ve never done before and pledge never to do unless under perforce) because WordPress 2.3 has been feature frozen.

Why am I complaining about the whitespace entitizing? Because IE6 AND IE7 both exhibit the Expanding Box Bug upon encountering non-breaking spaces, which, unfortunately, my workaround is unable to fix.

A standards-compliant browser does this (screenshot from Opera 9.50 alpha 1, still world’s most compliant browser):

My tag cloud in Opera 9.50 alpha 1

IE6 and 7 respectively do these (IE7 screenshot courtesy of Nicole, both taken on different dates):

My tag cloud in IE6My tag cloud in IE7

Right now I’ve implemented, under my conditional-commented <style> tag, Microsoft’s proprietary word-wrap CSS property to at least tame this in IE6 (currently thinking of a way to fix it in IE7) but you’ll see pathetically broken words. Still, being the standards advocate and shameless link plugger, I suggest you get Firefox or Opera.

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