A week in cross-browser-compatibility hell
Whew! It was. I was tasked to come up with a prototype design for a portal. I thought, hey, four days for a portal? Got my work cut out for me.
Turns out I was in for a very interesting (Chinese connotation) week. Making the site structure was okay, since the Boss had an inkling of what to place on the site. Problem was actually composing a site that is usable, friendly and not intimidating to beginners, which would comprise the end-users of the sites.
Layouting in CSS can be a bummer. I had to take care not to break the layout across different browsers. Again, MS refuses to cooperate. IE does its own rendering and interpretation of well-established web standards (read: non-standard). It took a horribly long time just getting the look right. IE is specially fragged when it comes to interpreting
But all's well that ends well. I finally came up with a decent-looking site by the end of office time on Friday.
Lessons: think of cross-browser compatibility issues at the onset of the design phase. It will save you a lot of headache later on. When your pages don't behave the way you expect them to, just stick to standards. Minimize the hacks and workarounds, they tend to break. And, make pages that degrade beautifully for non-standard browsers. If users of these browsers can't see the extra functionality that standard browsers offer, they wouldn't know what they're missing (at least, they couldn't care less so long as the site remains usable). In the end, it would be best to recommend a better browser.
Turns out I was in for a very interesting (Chinese connotation) week. Making the site structure was okay, since the Boss had an inkling of what to place on the site. Problem was actually composing a site that is usable, friendly and not intimidating to beginners, which would comprise the end-users of the sites.
Layouting in CSS can be a bummer. I had to take care not to break the layout across different browsers. Again, MS refuses to cooperate. IE does its own rendering and interpretation of well-established web standards (read: non-standard). It took a horribly long time just getting the look right. IE is specially fragged when it comes to interpreting
padding and margin tags in CSS. The box layout is also buggered.But all's well that ends well. I finally came up with a decent-looking site by the end of office time on Friday.
Lessons: think of cross-browser compatibility issues at the onset of the design phase. It will save you a lot of headache later on. When your pages don't behave the way you expect them to, just stick to standards. Minimize the hacks and workarounds, they tend to break. And, make pages that degrade beautifully for non-standard browsers. If users of these browsers can't see the extra functionality that standard browsers offer, they wouldn't know what they're missing (at least, they couldn't care less so long as the site remains usable). In the end, it would be best to recommend a better browser.
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