On Monday, June 28, 2004, at 09:32 AM, James Cummings wrote:
On Mon, 28 Jun 2004, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
all this said, i would still guess people on this list will have a higher percentage of IE5 and non-IE browsers with your users, in part because you probably have a larger mac audience than the general population. you probably also have more users with the lower resolution. these are obviously just guesses, though.
Probably. Should we be building sites to the browsers/users or just build them to the standards and wait for browers/users to catch up? Obviously while I'd like to do the latter, in practice I do the former. I do try to avoid the browser-specific hacks that were mentioned earlier however (for the already mentioned fear of their need for migration). This is common in CSS to produce hacks that display the same in MSIE and other browsers. Better, in my opinion, to only use CSS that most modern browsers understand.
agreed on all counts. my argument against designing for IE (and designing instead to standards) is really an argument against browser-specific design that is or amounts to a hack. i would include using IE-specific functionality or ignoring standards to make something work for IE in the latter category. the problem is that IE is the dominant browser, so you have to make decisions about what's more important in the long run.
the thing is that with mozilla and opera you at least have browsers that are committed to implementing the standards eventually, even if they don't do so (or do so very well), yet. microsoft is another kettle of fish.
anyhow, i don't want to continue to push this, since i think there's probably very little practical disagreement. i do think it's the kind of thing that we all need to keep in mind as we make design decisions now that we we will have to live with (or fix) down the road. that's really what it amounts to.
cheers,
j