On 19/05/2004, at 10:49 AM, Mike Pepper wrote:
I may suggest you tip that on it's head.
Dead serious. I build in IE then ensure I adjust accordingly. I know ahat
will happen in the Geckos.
If you start with IE then "patch" to Mozilla et al, then your thinking is too near-sighted. The standards are there, let's use them, then apply patches to make non-compliant browsers behave nicely. What happens in X years time when IE6 is irrelevant, and you've got to re-visit a whole bunch of stylesheets and bastardised mark-up getting rid of all the IE-centric bloat to ensure it works on the popular browsers of period.
I know IE is a *huge* market leader, and I *do* make sure my sites work in IE, but I most definitely tackle 99%-compliant browsers as a whole (Mozilla family, Safari, Opera, Omni, etc) first, because it's a FORWARDS compatible business practice. I use zero "hacks", and try and keep the style sheets as simple as possible.
THEN I create a separate style sheet for IE 6 (linked after the main sheet, so cascading applies to it), which is hidden inside an IE-only conditional comment.
THEN (if needed) I create an IE 5/5.5 style sheet (which cascades over the top of the other two) which deals with older versions of IE. Again, this is done with a conditional comment, so that only older IE browsers download it and read it.
What I'm achieving is a definite separation of long term, forwards compatible, future-ready style sheets from those which patch up older or less compliant browsers and will have a shorter life cycle.
In X years time when IE5/5.5/6 has disappeared off the radar, I can quite easily drop the stylesheet(s) all together, or make amendments without hacks and complex rules.
If you start with IE browsers, you're investing your time (and your clients money) in non-standard (or at least bloated) stylesheets which may create a burden in the future.
How will your hacks and IE-centric rules be interpreted by future compliant browsers and useragents (the ones which haven't even been invested yet)?
That's the whole point of standards -- you don't have to worry about that.
IMO, develop to the standard, then apply simple patches for difficult browsers for a pleasant future -- less bloat, simpler stylesheets, zero hacks, less dependance on *today*'s market leader.
--- Justin French http://indent.com.au
*****************************************************
The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
for some hints on posting to the list & getting help
*****************************************************
