Thoughts on Cross-Browser Coding
Posted by Kurt on Friday, May 8, 2009 in category:
I’ve met some people who hold low opinions of IE. Scratch that, I’ve met a whole lot of people for whom IE doesn’t butter their bread. I’m one of these people. These people tend to be web developers, because IE did a number of unfortunate things for people looking to create websites beyond the very baseline. There exist a number of “danger zones,”
- Transparent PNG support
- z-order
- Rounded corners
- Floats and margins
- Expanding boxes
Okay that’s all I can think of off the top of my head. The point is though, that none of these things are strictly necessary for a website. It’s easy enough to create a site that looks pretty much the same in IE5.5+ and the Firefox/Safari/Opera crowd, but if people choose to use a more modern browser, including newer versions of IE, the site will only get shinier.
Point of all this is, the people who don’t like IE and actively leave out fixes for it are not really professional level yet. Professional level developers neutrally regard or hate every browser equally. Firefox 2 has some weird layout issues, for instance, on sites that look fine in every other browser! CSS 3 support is still handled differently by everyone, each browser supporting a subset. The list continues.
