On Mon, Sep 1, 2008 at 8:55 PM, David McKinnon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > For a while now, I've been operating on the principle "Code for Firefox, > hack for IE". > > That is, writing CSS for the most standards-compliant browser, and then > making adjustments for non-standard behaviour. > I said this in a meeting last week to argue a point and my boss said "who > says?". > > I could have said "me", but maybe that's not a good enough answer. > Somewhere some years ago I read this, or heard someone at a conference or > something and it got stuck in my head. > > Is this the way anyone works? > Is it the best way to work? > Does anyone know where I got this idea from? Book? Blog? A bit of googling > this afternoon turned up not very much. > > Thanks, > David
I think that nobody has to have said it. It is simply a fact that is the easiest way to code. If you need an expert to tell you which way is best then you probably haven't tried it the other way around. Let me frame it in a metaphore. You're a teacher with 4 students, 3 of them are really good students, but the fourth is kind of slow, and has difficulty understanding instructions, and is frequently found making up his own little engish dailecs 4 u 2 reed. What approach would you take with this class? Do you start out by writing out the lesson in the dumbed down dialect, and hope that you don't bring down the level of the whole class by doing so? Or do you write the lesson in well structured english, and put dumbed down parentheticals to explain the difficult parts for the slow kid? In short, IE is a bad, outdated, dumb browser, and if you code for IE first, you run the risk of writing in a browser ebonics that make your pages look dumb to the other browsers, and you end up using slang words that none of the other browsers can understand properly. it's better to target the standards compliant browsers first (the ones that agree on a single language), and then dumb it down for the dumb browser. So, an appeal to an authority figure on this matter is not necessary. One only needs to look at the facts- And the evidence of the rather tenuous position many large companies now find themselves in when they can't upgrade from internet explorer 6 because all their intranet pages were authored to work ONLY in IE6. This is a tenuous position, because of the gaping security deficits in IE6 that put any large deployment in dire risk. sooner or later MS is going to stop supporting IE6, and then where will they be? So there's another argument: It's better to code to standards, because to depend on a single browser from a single company for your large investment is foolish. I'm sure you can come up with your own arguments, but yeah, it's also just easier to code in firefox first and then hack for IE. Firefox has fewer bugs, and is updated more frequently, and isn't trying to hold onto an illegal monopoly by pushing mutually indecipherable dialects, as microsoft does and continues to do. ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
