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Posted by Andy Dingley on 04/24/06 16:42
Travis Newbury wrote:
> Beauregard T. Shagnasty wrote:
> > Design for other browsers first, then possibly add some fixes for the IE
> > bugs.
>
> Why design for the minority and try to put fixes in for the majority?
> IE is still the most used browser there, so wouldn't it be prudent to
> make sure it works correctly in IE FIRST, then make the needed fixes
> for everything else?
No, for two reasons.
First of all, this is software not a widget factory. Volume doesn't
matter to software - if you have to do it once, you have to do it. Once
you've done it, you've done it for everyone.
The effort of support is the efort of designing this support, not a
volume-weighted sum. While we still have a situation of "at least one
IE user" and "at least one standards user" then we have to support
both, and supporting both is just the same work whether it's for one
user or for nearly all of them.
Secondly, the problem of IE support is now a question of working around
IE's faults. It's no longer the world of 2000 or so where there were
two clear browser camps with equal claim to being "best" (or at least,
"least broken"). It's now easy to design for a standards-based browser
and notably harder to design robustly for IE. In this context, it makes
sense to code to the standard first, then kludge it for IE later.
You should be _aware_ of IE's flaws from the start, but that doesn't
mean compromising the entire design (or at least not until you have to).
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