Web standards: the answer to your problems!

[Patrick Shannon]

Doesn't it annoy you when you go to a website and a message comes up that it is only supported by Internet Explorer, whatnot? (And sometimes, you can get around this message and come to find that the site works fine with other browsers.) Anyway, I'm from the school where if it doesn't work in anything else than IE, you didn't design it right. All my sites work in all major browsers, and I'm hardly a genius when it comes to these things.

But what is more aggrivating is when something does work in Firefox, then somehow gets broken along the way. This happened on our company's intranet where they implemented a simple checklist dropdown (you know, hit the plus and the links drop down.) Obviously a javascript implementation, and the nice part about that is it should work across most browsers. Not to mention it's a simple application. But naturally, this feature they added doesn't work on Firefox, and it's hiding major sections I need to get to. Sure there's IE tab or launching IE natively, but that's a workaround and not a solution. Besides, we're supposed to be a 508 accessible/standards based company ;)

But the answer to my problem I am told? "...there is a new version of IE coming out soon. The beta of IE 7 seems to be more like Firefox in that is allows you to have tabbed windows, etc. Maybe this will resolve some issues for the Firefox users."

:D :D :D

Why didn't I think about that? Come on Firefox users, what are we waiting for?

[JPnyc]

Anything I build is checked in trident, gecko, and Opera.

[Patrick Shannon]

Anything I build is checked in trident, gecko, and Opera.

Good man.

[JPnyc]

Unfortunately I don't have a mac to check in Safari, but sometimes I impose on a friend with a mac to check and send me a screenie

[chris_bcn]

Anyone that doesn't check in a variety of browsers should be tarred an feathered I reckon.

I have a subscription an browsercam to check in virtually every (graphical) browser around

[Patrick Shannon]

Unfortunately I don't have a mac to check in Safari, but sometimes I impose on a friend with a mac to check and send me a screenie

I find, with a few exceptions to this, that what works in Firefox will mostly work in Safari, fortunately.

[JPnyc]

I've seen enough exceptions to make me uneasy about it. Heck, I've even seen Netscrape and FF disagree in display, and they use the same engine, supposedly. Opera is the interesting one. 45% of the time it agrees with IE, 45% with Gecko, and 5% of the time with neither.

[jlknauff]

But the answer to my problem I am told? "...there is a new version of IE coming out soon. The beta of IE 7 seems to be more like Firefox in that is allows you to have tabbed windows, etc. Maybe this will resolve some issues for the Firefox users."IE7 behaves quite a lot like FF, however, I have run into some problems on one eccomerce site so far (dreamstime.com) and had to use FF to complete a transaction since I no longer have IE6.

[Patrick Shannon]

Yeah, I've played with IE7 beta and for what it's worth, I'm happy with some of the fixes they've done with it. I still won't use it (other than for testing), but it will make a lot of webdesigners happy.

Still, the point is this...let's say there is a building that claims itself to be handicap accessible and one day the elevator stops working. The only way up is the steps. The building manager says something like "There is a flight of steps on the side of the building, maybe that will solve the issue for the handicapped."

It doesn't solve it, and is not an answer, like the one I got, hehe ;)

[JPnyc]

I'm sorry to say they still haven't implemented CSS2 correctly but they've certainly gotten closer.

[chris_bcn]

They've followed the CSS 2.1 standard though. Most things are there - not complete, but a giant step forward.

You're bound to run into problems using IE7 - it's in Beta, and although it is CSS ready lots of aspects aren't. And we'll still have to support IE5.5 and 6, and probably 5 too, although I'd like to drop that

[JPnyc]

Right that's why I'm not getting too excited about it. Wasn't THAT long ago we still had to worry about IE4 and NS4.7. So we'll be dealing with IE6 for a long time to come.