Browser wars tenfold.

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I’m sure this subject has been broached many times, in many ways, but I need to have a go at it…

I started working with web design in the early days of the Explorer/Netscape browser wars. Back then we got frustrated because both browsers kept pushing proprietary features that forced us to design two sites in order to offer the best experience for both sets of users. Things evened out for a while, and a semi-standard seemed to have been achieved. Fast forward.

Now those days seem like “good ‘ol days” to me. Now we have over 20 browsers/versions spread across 3 platforms to design for. Each one with special . And a plethora of screen resolutions. And when you design any kind of site for functionality and massive content delivery, you have to take into account even more variables. And the advent of , as beautiful as it is, only caused more problems with proprietary standards and cross-browser inconsistencies. All told, a responsible web designer can’t design for any less than 5 variable situations. A well coded, bulletproof web design will degrade nicely across any browser, but getting your design to look the way you want it to in every circumstance takes extra blood, sweat and tears. I was reading this article at particle tree on dynamic, resolution dependent layouts, and thinking about how much extra planning and effort would go into a site that used this. It would work well for a CMS, but I can’t imagine hand coding a medium size site with this technique. Not for what people who want medium size sites are willing to spend around here, anyway. I love the idea of truly cross-platform sites that offer the best possible experience to all users, but until and other non-standards-compliant browsers catch up, there’s going to be a certain lowest common denominator factor in all mainstream web design.

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  1. IE7 and CSS… a dead horse? at Circle Six Blog 08.08.06 / 8pm

    […] Basically, the argument goes that Microsoft has pushed it’s proprietary code so far for so long that drastic changes to it’s rendering code would break half the web. So it’s a terrible, terrible self-fulfilling prophecy. While we as designers are all making sites in Firefox and then spending hours making them work in Explorer, Explorer is making it harder and harder to work with, so that we have to keep working harder and pushing our sites farther away from the standards. Some sites have so many hacks in place for IE that putting out a standards compliant browser in which the hacks still worked would be disastrous. However, fixing the CSS core to properly recognize a well formed CSS file would render the hacks obsolete and IE would read the code the same way Firefox does, right? And ideally, render it the same way. The next generation of browser wars could have one less (major) variable. […]