Today’s comic expresses my love affair with cheesecake, which is perhaps the most inappropriately named desert ever. It is not a cake, my friends. It is pie. Cheesepie, if you will… although that sounds like some sort of cheddar-filled crust with that title. The comic also features Pete LePage as a Microsoft stand-in, being subjected to the horror that is Quirks Mode.

I know we’re up to IE8 now, and IE9 is deliciously around the corner somewhere, waiting to pounce upon us. We’ve reached a point in our lives where many of us web designers can now tell IE6 support to bugger off… and actually get away with it. But IE7 still has an unfortunate market share, and in Mindfly Studio‘s case it’s something we still actively support for clients because they have enough users of that variety to make it a worry.

Most of the time, this isn’t an issue. We are, dare I say, good at what we do. But there are times where we’re required to use certain antiquated CMSes for a client that can’t switch out of that environment… and the problems begin to kick in. Code you can’t completely control is bound to be code that is going to repeatedly kick you in the nuts.

Gentlemen, I like my nuts.

Last week I spent almost two full days having the boys repeatedly booted by a hotel reservation CMS’s code that was making my best attempts at goods practice CSS and HTML look instead like what happens when you stuff a stick of dynamite in a sock packed with rancid meat. No matter how I tried to wrestle things around, IE7 was determined to kick into Quirks Mode, doing the most unexpected, unusual things to my layout.

I eventually got better, but I’d very much like to email a shovel to either the CMS’s manufacturer or Microsoft with a note explaining where to shove said farm implement.

To those of you trapped on corporate intranets forever, let me say how badly I feel for you. I can only imagine that this is your daily toil, your repentance for some unspoken crimes. But for the rest of us, let me say how glad I am that we can see an end date out there for Quirks Mode and it’s foul, reprehensible style-mangling.

P.S.: Wouldn’t Pete make a great representation of mild-mannered Bruce Banner? (Cue Lonely Man)