You learn something every day

You'll have seen our slide shows I expect. There's one on the homepage with all those nice wide images fading into each other. You can have them on your web sites too, by the way. You just have to ask.

Anyway, they work beautifully, text or images or both, can fade in and out in a dance of endless loveliness. Or so we thought. Then we created a slide show for Unique Earthenware which had nice big images at the bottom, with some text to introduce them above. It looked great in Firefox and Safari and Chrome. But not in IE 6, 7 or 8.

Instead of looking great, it looked as though someone had taken the text and replaced it with their stomach contents. "Blocky text" is not sufficient to describe the horror. Back to Firefox... aaaaah. Sneak a peek in IE... aaaaaarrrrghhhh. Initial thoughts were that we had to replace the text + images with images containing the text, but that seemed a cop out.

Aha! We work on the web, and sometimes it contains pearls of wisdom. A quick search revealed that the solution to the block text is either to use a background colour in the text containers that are fading in and out, or to use MS fonts, like MS Sans Serif. We specifically wanted to use Tahoma in these headlines, so we gave the tags a lovely background of white and Bob's your uncle. No more ugly block where our lovely text should be.

In the interests of accuracy, my fictional lawyers tell me I should point out that I haven't actually tried the MS font solution, but I expect it'll work. So, having found that out AND finally got a strangely configured IBM laptop onto the office wireless network, today is complete and I go to bed happy.