On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 10:47, Colin (Sandy) Pittendrigh < [email protected]> wrote:
> ....also, I (think) I have noticed IE6 on old low-resolution laptops > sometimes > looks substantially different than IE6 running on an XP box plugged in to > a high-resolution monitor. So perhaps a person needs an N cubed testing > routine: N-OS systems times N-resolutions times N-browsers. > > What is the professional debugging way proceed? > > I use vmware for IE 6 and 7 running in XP. Some differences I've seen between computers running IE: 1. Font smoothing: if they have font smoothing (anti-aliasing) turned off or set up wrong it can affect the display. Sometimes it can change how wide text is and result in words wrapping differently. 2. Different fonts installed. Some fonts from MS (like Arial Unicode) aren't always installed, but if they are, they can sometimes supersede the normal Arial. These fonts sometimes have slightly different metrics. 3. Different DPI settings: Different DPI settings mean font sizes measured in PX vs EMs vs percent will vary. 4. Slight differences in IE versions with different bugs (the AlphaImageLoader seems to have regressed in XP SP3 IE6, for example. I had major issues with it crashing my browser but my coworker with SP2 couldn't reproduce the problem). These factors also affect the cross-platform nature of development; that is, the font metrics on Windows will be different than Mac and thus the problems aren't strictly limited to Windows versions. The professional way to proceed is to determine (or estimate) the cost of testing yet another combination of hardware, software, settings, browsers, fonts, etc versus the benefits of getting the design exactly right for that user. Probably most of the time if you can make the site look good in Windows, Linux, and Mac then it'll be fine for most of the other settings. Do your best to make your designs flexible so that even extreme cases degrade gracefully. But remember that you first have to serve the majority of your users so spend most of your time doing that. (Side note: some people will compare supporting old or odd browsers to supporting disabled users. Technically the work involved is often similar, however on one hand people with odd systems are able to upgrade/change but disabled users usually can't become un-disabled. So you might find that you are spending a lot of time supporting blind users while spending zero time supporting IE6 users, even if those two populations have the same size and potential revenue) Mark ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [[email protected]] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
