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Posted by Andy Dingley on 04/21/06 18:20
Bill wrote:
> Here's the kicker, should I be designing the default page for IE 6 or something else?
Just don't do that at all. Design for the standard, not for this week's
fashionable browser bugs. There's one standard, it's objective.
Browser bugs always outnumber you, you'll never get on top of them.
That said, you have to be aware of IE simply because it's so
commonplace (so are rats). Being "aware of it" though is a lot
different to "designing for it". Study the well-known faults in IE and
the well-described ways to work around them. Make your standards-based
site behave itself in a way that's also IE-friendly. You don't even
need to look at the page in IE yet - all this stuff is described for
you, you don't need to explore and find it out for yourself.
Then test under IE. Discover the bugs you didn't even expect. Apply
fixes to them where you can (so long as they don't break the
standards-based design) or re-design the site and cut features if you
can't find any work-around.
Browser sniffing is just about the worst thing you could attempt. It's
separately both a bad idea inherently, and unworkable to achieve.
IE conditional comments are useful. They're a bogus idea, but they do
degrade quite well on real web tools. Just always code them as "If
broken M$ product" rather than "If standards-based mode". That way the
correct tools skip them.
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