First off IE penetration is starting to fall. Given the number of security
risks in that browser more and more people are switching to other browsers.
Its not really about making your site work well with a particular browser
anymore. Its about making your site available to all browsers not just now,
but in the future. Think about it as future proofing your site. We've all
had the experience of spending time making our site cross browser compatible
and then a new browser is released and *poof* our site breaks. That in a
nutshell is what web standards is for. When you design a site using web
standards, you are working toward the achievable end of making the content
in your site available to users now and in the future. (I shudder to think
about the sites I've written in the past that don't work well anymore
because they were cross browser, but most clients don't want to pay to have
them redone). So by implementing these standards now, I make sure I don't
have to go back and fix it later.
We've gotten to this mindset where we honestly believe we need to write
sites to a particular browser or another. Guess what? The browser wars are
done, all browser makers (including IE) have adopted Web Standards. The
biggest problem with IE is that it is over 4 years old (version 6 I mean)
and Microsoft is not giving any indication that it is going to upgrade
anytime before Longhorn (2006). With that said, even given the myriad of
CSS bugs in IE 5 and 6, (http://www.positioniseverything.net), it is still
possible to design a site for compliant browsers and then use judicious CSS
filters (I hate the word hacks) to feed different values to IE. In this way
you have the best of both worlds, sites that work in both IE and in other
compliant browsers.
If you are looking for pixel perfection in anything, forget it, you can fool
yourself that it can be seen in one way, but consider that more and more
people are connecting to the web in different ways (via screen readers for
the blind, pda's) and what about those older people (and I'm counting myself
as one) who decide they don't like the point size you've chosen and decided
to zoom the text? Does your layout still work? Does it work in every
browser, every operating system now and in the future. (I'm not talking
about v4 Browsers by the way, they were broken before and designing for a
0.4% share of the market is stupid). But what about the 15-30% of the
population that has functional disabiilties. Why aren't you designing for
them? By separating your content from your presentation (including layout)
which is what Web standards implies, you do yourself, your market and your
company a world of good. After all, consider this.
Google and A9 (Amazon's new search engine) is the biggest blind user of the
internet.
Sandy Clark
http://www.shayna.com <http://www.shayna.com/>
CF Pretty Accessible at http://www.shayna.com/blog
Now offering 4 days Hands on CSS training October 11-14th. Rockville, MD.
For more information go to:
http://www.teratech.com/training/oc_classes.cfm#css
_____
From: G [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 10:10 AM
To: CF-Community
Subject: Re: IE Browser
But if 90+ percent of your users are going to be using IE...doesn't it
behoove you to design your site to work at its optimum in that browser,
whatever its' restrictions?
----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy Clark
To: CF-Community
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 9:01 AM
Subject: RE: IE Browser
Well if you aren't using descendant, adjacent sibling or child selectors
(which are very powerful and which IE doesn't support without IE7) and if
you want to do CSS menus that don't require _javascript_ but do require that
you be allowed to use the :hover psuedo element on anything but an <a
href>
tag. Then yes, IE is fine and will probably work with other items.
However, if you want to get away from using a class for everything and
want
to take advantage of Semantic markup, and you want to be able to take
advantage of more of CSS 2 than IE will support (again IE7 does help
immensely in that), then I stand by my prior statement.
Sandy Clark
http://www.shayna.com <http://www.shayna.com/>
CF Pretty Accessible at http://www.shayna.com/blog
Now offering 4 days Hands on CSS training October 11-14th. Rockville, MD.
For more information go to:
http://www.teratech.com/training/oc_classes.cfm#css
<snip>
_____
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