Posted by mbstevens on 04/21/06 17:32

Bill wrote:
> I'm working on learning html/css/java etc so I can maintain a church website
> and am currently rewriting said site to use css instead of tables for
> formating. After getting a good chunk of the way through the rewrite I
> decided to try viewing the site in other browsers, Netscape, mozilla and
> Opera, to see how well the would handle a site designed for IE 6. Of course
> there are differences so I was looking into detecting different browsers so
> I could add in css sheets to fix individual browser problems. Here's the
> kicker, should I be designing the default page for IE 6 or something else?
> What I mean is do I make a page that looks good in IE 6 and fix it for the
> other browsers or do I use something else and fix the page for IE 6 quirks
> and bugs?? Which browser is more Standards Complient? I figure that I'd be
> better off getting as close to Complient as possible and adding fixes for IE
> 6 but I'm not sure WHICH browser is the closest. Any suggestions??
>
> Bill
>
>
If you're doing standards markup and CSS that is so critical that it
doesn't look good in _most_ browsers, then you are probably trying to
put too much on the page, or are trying to do visual things that
standard markup does not do well. The first thing to try is
spreading the information out to more pages while making each page
simpler in ways that it does not have to look exactly the same across
browsers.

If you find yourself trying to detect browsers, you're doing something
wrong. It does make sense, if you insist, to detect _capabilities_
on occasion. But you can easily write pages that don't require this,
and this is what you should shoot for at first.
--
mbstevens
http://www.mbstevens.com/

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