Web Sites
May 1, 2008
Do web sites need to look exactly the same in every browser? I agree with this thoughtful consideration—with recent web sites I’ve created, I simply used CSS for items like rounded corners and drop shadows, and let the site degrade gracefully in browsers that aren’t up to snuff.
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it’d be more amusing if the site itself gracefully degraded (maybe it does in IE6, don’t have it on my laptop).
That said, browser-rendered-rounded corners look like utter shite to my eyes.
It’s not your eyes, adam, it’s your browser. :) Firefox 3 and Safari render rounded corners as beautifully as anything one could do with the old hacky techniques. For those that don’t do such a good job (or don’t even try), that’s a defect of the browser, not the site.
Guys, I guess you both need to check your website stats and see how many of your visitors have Firefox 3 and Safari. I know, CSS shadows and round corners look beautiful on them, but that is the future for visitors. We (web developers) still have to hack, still have to check our websites on IE, still have to “see” what visitors “see” and work for them. Do not design for designers (yet).
I think you misunderstood what I meant by “degrade,” taty. It’s not that I don’t test in IE6, or IE7, or IE8, or Firefox 2, or whatever… it’s that this is 2008, web standards have been standards for years, and there’s no reason why we should still be faking with images and hacky markup what can be cleanly done with CSS. So my IE6 users don’t see rounded rectangles. Big deal.
I own a G4 Cube released around the same time that Internet Explorer 6 was. I recently refreshed the Cube for a friend and tried to install Leopard on it. It practically laughed at me when I launched the installer. So I installed Tiger, and it works ok, but some of the nifty animation and such is missing. This is ok.
It’s important that our web sites function for the unfortunate majority of users who use outdated browsers. But this isn’t the future, this is the present, and as long as organizations like Apple and Mozilla are releasing new browsers with cutting-edge standards support, and making them freely available, there’s no point in resorting to hacks for things that CSS can do better.