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The ugly:
You use FrontPage or something like that to create a web site, which produces highly broken code that, for some reason, works in Internet Explorer 6. It “works”, so you launch it. You lose 20% of your potential clients, and more of 50% of the “tech-savvy” ones.
The bad:
You use FrontPage or something like that to create a web site, which produces highly broken code that, for some reason, works in Internet Explorer 6. You see that your site doesn’t work in Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, and/or Safari, so you waste days trying to fix hundreds of HTML bugs. After that, you find that it no longer works properly in IE 6, so you end up using Javascript to detect the browser, and giving different versions of code to each. You curse those pesky Firefox / Opera / Konqueror / Safari “weirdos”, who just have to be “different”, refusing to use the “standard browser,” Internet Explorer, and only increase your workload.
The good:
You code a web site according to standards, which, assuming you didn’t make any mistakes, means that it works in Firefox, Opera, Konqueror and Safari. You test it in IE, and find that some parts don’t work properly due to IE bugs or lack of support for parts of some standards, so you work around those — sticking to the standards — and ensure that it works in IE as well. Again, assuming you didn’t make mistakes, it still works perfectly in the standards-compliant browsers. Furthermore, the site degrades gracefully (that is, it may not have all the bells and whistles, but it works, and all the content is accessible) in cell phones, Blackberries, PDAs, Sony PSPs, etc..
Related posts:
Here’s what I do: I build the website following the standards published by W3C and then I check what’s the result in IE. Then I try to fix IE’s lack of PNG/CSS2 support by adding known fixes. For example, the box model.
also, I keep two different CSS, one that’s the standard and another one that overrides if the browser is IE. On the second CSS, reserved for IE, I just override things that don’t work. For example, the heritance property (
I want more.. how about lynx, links!?
like this one: lynx http://www.hdtondela.min-saude.pt/xyz/
The correct one:
http://www.hdtondela.min-saude.pt/xyz/index2.php
What you described is not really web design, it’s somewhere beetween web design and web developing!
Web design is not coding your markup according to standards – that’s a very naive description
Joao: I never said web design was just coding according to standards. I said (or, more precisely, implied) that good web design included coding according to standards.
Just like architecture is not simply designing how the building will look like – it’s also a good idea to design it so it doesn’t fall down when it’s windy, or something.
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