[Glastonbury] here we stand... on a rocky shore...

[tim hall]

On Sunday 13 November 2005 12:47, Ian Dickinson was like:
> > Glad to hear it. I had someone complaining at me this morning
> > that McAfee _forced_ them to use IE. The only other app. that
> > forces you to use IE is Microsoft's own Windows Update :)
>
> It's more subtle than that, in my experience. There are huge
> differences between the rendering engines in the (different versions
> of) the Mozilla browsers and (the different versions of) the Microsoft
> browsers, not to mention Safari, Opera, Konqueror, etc. 

I thought there were three rendering engines - Gecko, khtml and whatever IE 
uses. Does Opera use something different? IME Gecko tends to render standards 
compliant code correctly.

> Many web 
> designers don't have the means or inclination to test their sites on
> multiple different platforms. And if 90% of their traffic comes from
> IE-on-windows, it's easy to understand why the designers might
> optimise to that platform and not pay too much heed to other users'
> needs. Note I say understand not condone - it's very frustrating for
> those of us in the minority segment, and I have no end of sites that
> give me a worse user-experience just because I'm using FireFox. And I
> have to say that it's *hard* to get cross-browser sites right. I
> design in pure standards-compliant XHTML and CSS. I couldn't get the
> last site I produced to work perfectly in both FireFox and IE 5+
> (didn't even bother with IE4). 

Yeah, I noticed that older versions of IE don't render XHTML properly. I tend 
to write in HTML4.01 + CSS2 still for that reason.

> In the end, I have it that it gives the 
> best user experience in FireFox, since I expect a larger section of
> the site's future traffic will be using non-MS browsers. I haven't
> tested on Safari because I don't have a Mac nor on Opera because I
> couldn't be bothered :-)

I know it's a rather bull-headed attitude, but if the code validates then it's 
the browser's problem if it doesn't render properly. ;] About 15% of my 
visitors are using Firefox and another 10% are using something other than 
MSIE6 (Mostly Mozilla). Unfortunately the vast majority (90%) are still using 
WinXP. :( Personally, I never touch the stuff. ;p

-- 
cheers,

tim hall
http://glastonburymusic.org.uk/tim