#4 - What changes might you be looking at based on the better compliance of IE 7?
Chuck Harris - Astrixs - Best business practice has always been to design, develop and deliver a site that is w3c compliant, so why should things be different with new releases of browsers? Don’t get me wrong; I am happy to see the new releases, if only from the fact that they (the new browsers) are doing a better and more consistent job in rendering compliant code.
If you hadn’t been creating compliant code, then you were missing out on cross platform compatibility (such as desktop browser, mobile devices, impaired readers) and initiatives as well as incentives that Google and other search engines had given us all to become more compliant (such as higher search engine rankings). A couple dated, yet very good articles on the subject are: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/accessibilityseo/ and http://www.alistapart.com/articles/seo/
Eric Smith - Mind Architecture - I’ve always attempted to write standards compliant code with as few browser-specific (read IE-specific) hacks as possible. My stylesheets typically had rules that applied to standards-compliant browsers then a section of hacks - mostly for IE’s doubled-margin bug and for differences in IE’s rendering of form elements and handling of floats.
With these inconsistencies in mind, I haven’t bothered to learn any of the CSS pseudo-selectors or any other techniques that wouldn’t work (or was
inconsistent) in IE.
So, with IE7’s better support for web standards, I won’t necessarily be making more standards-compliant sites, I’ll just be able to use fewer browser-specific hacks than in the past. I’ll also be more willing to learn more of the CSS specification (that part that IE previously did not support) knowing that the majority of users (eventually) will be able to take advantage.
Now if IE could just implement the ECMA/Javascript specification correctly…
Stephen Schneider - Mind Architecture - Mind Architecture is not a layout and design company. Most of the time we have a site already layed out from a designer. So most times we have no say in the use of CSS or anything else. We work with whatever code we get, which is sometimes from a bad editor or just has bad choices in the tags. With IE7 being more compliant, it will be easier to show designers how CSS is beneficial for everyone to use. We shouldn’t have as many ‘Oh yeah, but…’ type of conversations where we have to explain why something works different here or there. If we had code that used more CSS, we could more easily make the pages dynamic and add in our coding to it. There would be less issues of a wrong font or something afterwards also. Plus, later, if the design needs changed a bit, it would be quicker and less expensive to do. So yes, I think we can help to get more sites compliant in a more round about way and get more designers to see how CSS can be easy and extremely helpful to their business.
November 27th, 2006 at 11:32 am
There is a lot that I don’t like about IE7. Being standards-compliant is something that I appreciate but would expect from ANY browser. Eric said it well about having to do less hacks. I can’t say it that well without sounding biased!