Be Realistic, Be Like Internet Explorer
Web designers and developers have long demanded consistency of standards. It’s frustrating when web pages appear differently on different browsers. Internet Explorer is the most criticised browser for needing “hacks”. Yet in the absence of consistent standards Internet Explorer provides one of the most helpful services to designers.
I’ve seen a lot of powerful recommendations for Firefox 3 over the last few weeks. I’ve been using it in beta version for a good while now. Firefox’s extended functionality and web developer specific add-ons make it invaluable. And as a designer I test my sites on Internet Explorer 6, 7, Firefox, Safari and Opera. There’s always glitches.
Inconsistency is the rule, not the exception
There are certain design inconsistencies between Firefox versions 2 and 3. Just as there are slight inconsistencies with Safari and with Opera. None of them are major, none of them have a significant impact on functionality and usability. But they do impact aesthetics - important to me as a designer - and they are irritating.
Take a look at a site I recently designed - www.cannon-on-sports.com. Particularly, look at the spacing directly above the search bar in the right hand column. The search bar is stored within a div called #search, and the top margin of that div is set as 20 pixels.
That works fine in Firefox 2 and in Safari 3. In Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 3 and Opera there are issues. There’s a double counting of the margin that I can’t track down in the CSS. But here’s the crux. I can fix that easily in Internet Explorer.
Microsoft causes the problems, but they help me solve them
I can do that because Internet Explorer allows me to use conditional comments to load new CSS. I can target stylesheets that are only loaded for Internet Explorer, either universally or for specific versions.
Conditional stylesheets are often highlighted when pointing out the flaws in Internet Explorer’s CSS support. And there are definitely many flaws. In an ideal world there wouldn’t be any need for conditional stylesheets. But it’s not an ideal world. There remain standards inconsistencies not only between different browsers but between different versions of the same standards.
You always find little glitches when you’re putting together a CSS page. When those glitches exist in Internet Explorer I know that I can solve them. There are many times I’ve wished that other browsers provided for conditional stylesheets.
I’d like my support to be realistic, not idealistic
I’m not claiming that there are no flaws in my CSS coding. Nor that any particular browser is better than another in its CSS support. The point here is that there are continuing inconsistencies. For all its flaws - and in pure standards support Internet Explorer is severely flawed - Microsoft appear to have acknowledged that and give me as a designer a way to easily target their browser.
Others browsers may be purer. They may be objectively better in dealing with CSS. But as a designer, aiming to give a strong experience to all browser users, they could do more to help me.
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