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After completing my "Vintage 1982" rehab of this site, I thought I better test it in a bunch of different browsers. After all, Macintosh has something approaching a 5% market share. So I fired up Camino. Looked fine. Then Firefox. Looked fine. Then Internet Explorer. Not really the way I laid it out. A large black band separated the top and bottom sections.
My immediate reaction was to curse Microsoft for not "interpreting" the CSS standards in the same way that more compliant browsers did. In the midst of researching the many problems IE has with CSS, two friends weighed in defense of coding to IE. One accused me of being a "mac/mozilla whiner," while the other merely offered that since all his clients (and/or their customers) run Explorer, that there was little sense in coding for anything else. They have a point about designing to the standard that most people use, but I think they cede too much too quickly to Microsoft.
There is right and there is wrong, and these two friends of mine are among the quickest to acknowledge injustice and stupidity elsewhere in the world. What Microsoft is doing to ensure that people write to their standard only is wrong. Moreover, Microsoft achieved its dominance in the market by wrongdoing. Should web developers cede ground to them because they are the big kahuna? Has market might made right?
A practical consideration Explorer-oriented codebots might keep in mind is that once Microsoft does update Explorer to be standard-compliant, they will have go back and clean up all the hacks they put in place to make their pages work with Explorer. The reason I avoided using tables for layout, as one of my Explorer-supporting friends does, is that using them that way is being deprecated and thus is no longer considered "clean code." If I had stuck with tables as my friend has, I would have never encountered the problem of the black bar.
As it turns out, changing my code will be easy. Explorer has a problem rendering two divs extending to the margin, at least when is side by side with a floating element. To make my site Explorer-compliant, I had to fix the size of the elements rather than let them run to the margins. When Microsoft gets around to complying, all I will have to do is remove a couple of width tags.
The blog looks only a little worse for the size imposition; some may prefer it this way. As a designer, I do feel insulted by the extra effort I had to take to achieve an inferior result. Unfortunately, it is a pattern that carries through many of the Microsoft products with which I have had to work.
This site still looks better with CSS-compliant browsers like Firefox, Mozilla, or Netscape. I notice that in Explorer, the grey and red boxes do right align properly. In order to make them do so I would have to change the width properties of a couple of elements, making them display improperly on the other browsers.
For the record, there are many sites that look better with compliant browsers; Dooce looks even worse than this blog in IE. I have yet to find a site that actually looks better in IE. Good designers need good browsers. The failure to adopt standards ultimately leads to a dumbing-down of code to the least common denominator. This in turn retards the development of the web as a medium for creative expression and (especially visual) communication.
Posted by Underblog at February 27, 2005 1:16 PM
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Keep an eye on Europe and the rest of the world... they tire of the MS stuff.
Posted by: Keep N. Itreal at February 28, 2005 6:32 PM
Jenny Miller is an old meaney.
Posted by: Cardinal Slim at February 28, 2005 11:44 PM