It has come to my attention that when I embed a YouTube video here, and this site is viewed through Internet Explorer, it looks ugly. The video sits on top of the text like a block of styrofoam in the ocean, instead of being smoothly wrapped by text. The reason for this is Microsoft Internet Explorer.

IE is, in this web developer's eyes, a problem child. Browsers like Opera, Firefox, and Google's Chrome all follow (to a greater or lesser extent) W3C standards. Microsoft, however, has long made it a practice to do things their own way, ignoring standards followed by everyone else. This is their business strategy. If you get used to doing things Microsoft's way, so goes the theory, then you will be bound to them for life, for better or worse.

It's a very poor business strategy, IMHO. And I won't even go into the security risks to your private data that IE presents.

I try to make things look nice for IE users. After all, they comprise 57.5% of this site's visitors. But, unfortunately, you can't have your cake and eat it too when it comes to embedding YouTube videos. There is code that will allow text to wrap nicely in IE and in the polite browsers, but it's a complicated jumble that has to be customized for every video embedded.

So I have decided to make the videos look nicely text-wrapped for Firefox et al. That means that they should also look nice for any non-IE browser.

My apologies for the ugly placement of YouTube videos, IE users. It's nothing personal. There's a reason that IE's market share drops every month. Please look into trying Firefox, Opera, or Chrome. It's safer, the web looks better, and it'll make you feel better about yourself.