Comment Re:Standards compliance is cheap. (Score 1) 137
I bought into the coolaid that "If you follow the standards your site will look good on most browsers, including IE."
It should read "If you follow standards your site will look good on most browsers, EXCEPT IE."
Being a Linux user I made the mistake of initially designed a site using Opera, Konqueror and Firefox following the w3c recommendations. The differences between how these browsers render are relatively minor and its usually easy to find a good common denominator. Then there is IE, especially 6 but 7 still isn't in the same league as those other browsers. I had to restructure my HTML to get it to work good enough in IE. I wanted a tabular layout for screen rendering for one part but I thought divs would be better markup. This isn't a problem in all modern browsers except IE. And IE 6 had this really weird bug where part of the page background would turn grey when you scrolled the page down then up again. I never seen something that pathological in the other browsers. I shuffled the markup around a bit and it went away.
If you need to support IE, you should test with it from day 1 (it will shape how you implement a site). If you need to support Opera, Konqueror and Safari you can test with just Firefox (following w3c recommendations) and fix the minor problems at the end.
And using a w3c validator is not enough to verify if a page will render right on all browsers. There are many little gotchas in CSS that can vary between browsers, especially with IE.
I personally prefer Firefox for development (firebug ...) and Konqueror for daily browsing.
It should read "If you follow standards your site will look good on most browsers, EXCEPT IE."
Being a Linux user I made the mistake of initially designed a site using Opera, Konqueror and Firefox following the w3c recommendations. The differences between how these browsers render are relatively minor and its usually easy to find a good common denominator. Then there is IE, especially 6 but 7 still isn't in the same league as those other browsers. I had to restructure my HTML to get it to work good enough in IE. I wanted a tabular layout for screen rendering for one part but I thought divs would be better markup. This isn't a problem in all modern browsers except IE. And IE 6 had this really weird bug where part of the page background would turn grey when you scrolled the page down then up again. I never seen something that pathological in the other browsers. I shuffled the markup around a bit and it went away.
If you need to support IE, you should test with it from day 1 (it will shape how you implement a site). If you need to support Opera, Konqueror and Safari you can test with just Firefox (following w3c recommendations) and fix the minor problems at the end.
And using a w3c validator is not enough to verify if a page will render right on all browsers. There are many little gotchas in CSS that can vary between browsers, especially with IE.
I personally prefer Firefox for development (firebug
