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Cross Browser Compatibility – The Onus On Designers
A short grumble about browser differences
by Rupert Sharp
of http://www.oyster-web.co.uk
Last updated: 6 Nov 2007
The thing that gets on my back more than anything when designing a new page or site is getting it to work on different browsers, this infuriates me to no end. My personal choice for a browser is Firefox as this displays HTML in as sensible and standards compliant a manner as wanted, but kiss goodbye to your careful styling when viewing it on IE. The difficulty in most cases is the way most browsers implement CSS in different ways. IE6 is notorious in this regard although even IE7 has significant problems. Many irritating hours are spent by people such as us figuring out why certain things just don't work and fixing them, and god forbid that you're using Linux or a Macintosh to display your pages as even in the Linux version of Firefox things look like they've been caught in a tornado. Of course it would make designers lives alot easier if everyone used the same browser but unfortunately they don't, so you have to optimise for browser-compatibility as well as everything else. As a designer you have to ensure that users don't have to settle with a 'oh it'll have to do' website as this really is not an option. Basically the message of this short entry is have more than one browser installed on your computer and test your pages out on each of them before considering it 'done'. Unfortunately one of the worst is trying to get it to work on Linux, all the browsers seem poised against us (bangs head).
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