FIXED the holy living FUCK out of the problem that was causing my MARS s.t.s. downloads page to screw up. BONUS!
what happens is that since IE on Win doesn’t do a good job at displaying PNGs, what i have to do is use what’s called an opacity filter in CSS (“cascading stylesheets”; that’s what formats the page, as opposed to the content itself – think of it as all the bold and italic commands in one separate file (along with a whole SLEW of other nifty things that get done, such as colors, backgrounds, positioning, etc….))
because IE on Win continues to suck ass-milk even at this stage, the lower opacity (translucency or semi-transparency) inherits itself from the parent element (a block housing certain specific content); both the background for the cool-looking window thing AND the text inside of it are semi-transparent, making it hard as hell to read at this point. even telling the text INSIDE the parent element to go back to 100% opacity won’t work, because Microsoft just sucks that damn much.
SO. what we need to do is put dummy content in first. this content will be totally semi-transparent, text and all. what the hell! we don’t care. because then, we’re going to put a top layer of solidly opaque, OTHERWISE IDENTICAL content on top of it (but if and ONLY if a program called a “browser sniffer” determines that the user is on a Windows machine and is using Infernal Exploiter).
now we have a layer of semi-transparent stuff, with the cool-looking shit that you can see the page background through, and a layer of totally opaque stuff on top, that we can actually read. (btw, the top layer doesn’t even have the background at all, otherwise it would be solid and we couldn’t see through it, which was our original goal).
THE PROBLEM WITH THE DOWNLOADS PAGE WAS THIS:
i’m using a download counter which declares a function (just a thing to count the number of times a link is clicked). because you cannot call a function with the exact same name and properties twice, you get a fatal error in PHP (the scripting language). so when the content is inserted once, everything’s okay. insert it again, however, and you’re fucked straight up the wall – without any butt-goo to ease the thrust.
what i did, then, was tell the browser that IF the page requested is called “download” *and* IF the browser happens to be IE/Win, then and only then we’ll include an ALTERNATE page the first time around (and the normal content the second time). that way, the function is only declared the second time. plus, if the user isn’t on IE/Win, and/or the page requested is not the “download” page, then everything functions as per normal, and the virtually-exact same content is called forth twice as usual.
i also, just for shits and giggles, i added an event handler to submit the skin change as soon as it is selected (as opposed to having to click the pesky button), and told it to display the name of the current skin by default in the skin selector. plus, i added the nifty PayPal donate button, just to have something to collect dust with.
i rock. so. fucking. hardcore.
