Ever the lover of a good argument, I couldn't resist starting this one off I'm a professional designer/developer and have been reading your comments on these forums suggesting people switch away from IE when designing their sites. I have to disagree with this - although IE is indeed useless, a large proportion of the surfing world use it. Switching to Firefox/Opera/whatever is definitely a good idea for your own personal browsing - but to any aspiring designers out there using these forums - if you want a bullet-proof design, ensure it works at least in IE6 along with FF/Opera etc. Completely ignoring the existence of IE when designing is a fundamental flaw that 'will' lead to clients complaining. Also, in my experience, tailoring a site to be able to handle IE's prissy temperament is really not that difficult (although it is tedious, I'll grant you that). Anyone have any input?
i agree that the site should be designed to work in IE as well as Firefox/Opera. IE can be a pain to develop for sometimes with CSS, but I find if you use a proper DocType on your documents, then IE doesn't do such a bad job at rendering the page. Without a doctype its more of a nightmare. I find now that I've had experience with how IE renders different than Firefox, I can plan ahead and know how to program what I want to work in both browsers.
You have apparently missed the point entirely. No one espouses ignoring IE, as much as we'd like to. What we say is to develop in a modern, standards compliant browser. That helps to ensure your markup and css are well structured, semantic and valid. Since IE supports less than half of css2, and gets much of that wrong, if you code against IE as your testbed, you will write buggy code. It is a royal PITA to then make that buggy code work in modern browsers. If you start with good markup and css, it is trivial (by comparison) to apply work-arounds, hacks, or to just plain dumb things down for IE. Another plus is that your code is fairly future proofed. Bad code, that written with IE as the testbed, is likely to break at some time or another if it hasn't already. If you truly prefer to develop for IE, then fix for modern browsers, that's your choice; you say you're a pro, even if you're five years behind times, so I'll assume you have good reason. If you encourage neophytes to follow that path, you do them a disservice. There's no argument; there's only best practice and there's your way. cheers, gary
I hate IE... I design tons of websites, and usually the majority of my problems occur in IE. Firefox usually always shows the content in the manner I intended. I can't say the same for IE, even when my code is WC3 standards... Prefferably, I would like to completely disregard the browser all together... Unfortunately it makes up the majority of browsers used today. Thankfully, firefox is becoming one of the fastest growing browsers today. You wouldn't believe how many more times I talk to people who use FF over IE. Now, i'm just awaiting the day when IE isn't packaged with windows.
Firefox is common among web developers and others earning their life online. I'm afraid too many regular survers are still using IE, and your target audience is very likely to regard those IE users, too. So it's a destiny that we have to do our coding and check compatibility with a bunch of browsers, eh..