Web development is one of the few areas left in "software" development
that still has a moving target for the user interface. Traditional
development mediums whether they be Winforms, Delphi, whatever your
flavor, if you place a control on the form it's going to be there. It's
going to be right where you expect it to be, and it will be there every
time you launch the application.
Historically, web development
has had the battle of which browser engine to "cater" to. Lately,
however, a new wrinkle has been added - which version of IE do you
cater to.
IE6 has a storied past, requiring a plethora of hacks
just to get it close to CSS standards. My CSS code is riddled with
hacks like "width: 200px; _width: 180px; padding: 10px;" because IE6
has a different interpretation of what constitutes the size of a box.
Of
course, the way that IE6 failed to handle the alpha-transparency of a
.png graphic became really annoying even with some very creative minds
trying to develop solutions, they still didn't want to play nice in all
situations.
As of June 1st, 2008, Castagna.net will be targeting
our development to two primary browsers: Firefox v2.0x and Internet
Explorer 7, with as much graceful support as possible for lesser
browsers such as Safari, Opera and IE6. This new effort should save
countless hours of having to fine-tune CSS stylesheets simply to
accommodate a buggy browser such as IE6.
One of the reasons we
have chosen this is because of trends in the industry. Depending on
which source you consult, IE7 is within two percentage points either
way of IE6. Firefox has also been enjoying some solid growth, but still
falls several points behind the combined percentages of IE6 and IE7.
The
other reason is because Microsoft is making it quite difficult to avoid
IE7. All new installations of Vista have IE7 bundled along. Further,
Windows Update is back to "requiring" IE7 as an update - and only those
who are determined enough to reject this required update are able to
stay on IE6.
I know there are a few instances where IE7 may not
be installed - such as a corporate environment that has other
dependencies on IE6, but slowly but surely, those situations will also
fall in favor of IE7.
I would still love to see the browsers
fully embrace the CSS standards through 2.0 and start to put release
candidates out the support CSS3. It's taken years and years to get to
this point. I'm happy that IE7 is significantly better than IE6.
If you would like to check out the browser trends, here are two links that provide some statistics:
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2008/April/browser.php http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp