Nick, > No, no - I'm not suggesting for a second we should *only* develop for > IE, or any other certain browsers! Just the opposite - I make a point > of delivering my clients' message to the maximum number of visitors. > And I'm not bitter; just realistic. That's why I say 'IE is here to > stay'. Thanks to the many gurus around, we have a whole menu of hacks > available so we *can* deliver Standards-driven sites to non-compliant > browsers.
Could it be that your site is broken, not the browser? We don't have any trouble accommodating IE with standards compliant code. I think your taking the argument too far and blaming the tool. IE had CSS support earlier than Netscape did. Don't simply cut down the tall poppy because there is a sympathetic (anti-M$) audience in the web standards community (and no, not all of us agree) and don't try (like you could) to incite another browser war. That's what started all this and Netscape was equally to blame. [note to self, work on sentence structure... Next time] It is a far far easier internet to code for now with compliant code. Look at the crap we had to write when NN 4 and IE 4 were battling it out. Both were very wrong and we had to use things like the '4 horsemen' to accommodate both. No wonder table layouts were used so heavily. There are very few issues remaining if you code your page thoughtfully (not in quirks mode) and ignore the features (like attribute selectors) that don't work in IE. Get over it. PNG Transparency is a slight pain but we still have gif and jpg alternatives so it isn't a killer. The only problem (not for me) is the Mime-type issue for XHTML 1.1 but as I've said before, I've yet to see someone using XHTML for any purpose other than plain mark-up and the best language to do that with (in my opinion) is still HTML 4.01 or if you really really must keep up with the Jones', XHTML 1.0 Transitional (HTML 5.0). There are a few other tweaks required (e.g. white space in lists) but they don't change it from still being standards compliant. Once you learn to code it correctly (or have a base set of code to start each site with), these are not big issues at all. If you have to use a multitude of hacks to get your design to work in IE then you just plain built it wrong. Ask for help. That's what this list is for. If it's XHTML 1.1 then you won't win. The web isn't ready for XHTML 1.1. The major browser doesn't accept it in the required format (and there are other issues with search engines etc. as well). Yes, this is IE's fault, but it's simple, don't use the language. Tell me why you have to use XHTML 1.1. Anyone? Depending on the answer I may have to climb a mountain. > 100% compliant browsers. Write once, publish anywhere. It's the dream > of Standards, right? I'm all for it; I'll do my bit, and > more. But it's > not the real world - not yet. I believe it is. But there will always be browser bugs (all of them have bugs) and the only way to do what you want is to lose the niche browsers like Firefox and Opera and go with IE, so that argument will never fly. NN 4 is still a bigger problem than IE (with a much smaller footprint though, thankfully due to IE's dominance winning that war). At least IE gets updated readily by the users (usually automatically) whereas a Netscape (4) user (or a corporation/department) is less likely to upgrade and when they do eventually change, it'll generally be to IE because it's a better business decision. That's exactly what I would do. It's there when you start the machine the first time (assuming they're using Windows which most will), it manages itself with security updates and service packs and (if the web developers do their job correctly) it works flawlessly. Using hacks to fix what you're doing (probably for pixel perfection) is a far bigger problem than IE's compliance. BTW your site http://www.omnivision.com.au/ has a JavaScript error... I suggest you use IE with the debugger turned on to find it :-) P ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *****************************************************
