You could, TJdude, but it’s doubling work. Also, some redirects fuck up getting listed on search engines. The ‘click here’ buttons are very unprofessional too. Best to make a page that works in both, first-off.
:smack:
Uhh, that shoulda read “Open those projects that look fine in Internet Explorer but look like shit in Firefox in:”
I should add that back in the days of Netscape I had to make a CSS switcher that checked the browser type in JavaScript, then chose a different stylesheet based on the result. Not a perfect solution, but took away a serious headache with form rendering. In that case it was Nutscrape that was misbehaving, not IE.
Strange. I’ve used several design concepts from csszengarden.com without any problem whatsoever in Firefox. All the designs I’ve browsed there work just fine for me. Are you using a current version? Using a three-column layout? Remember: the box model hack is only for IE 5.
The stats off my website say only 55.5% IE. The rest are 19.8% “Netscape”, 12.9% “Unknown”, 10.7% “up.”, whatever that means, and a total of 1.2% for other named browsers (Lynx, iCab, Konqueror, etc).
Granted, this is out of a total number of only around 2600 hits. But given that I know someone using iCab on Macintosh System 9 is looking at it, and that person is a client, designing to standards only makes sense.
(Until pretty recently I was the one human on System 9 using iCab, sorry. I’ve switched over, now, though, so you can stop sweating it)
The only problem I’ve had with compatability issues with Firefox was 1) they don’t have colored scrollbars (no big loss) and 2) some of my tables needed some tweaking. Because I knew exactly where the problem lay, it got fixed in no time whatsoever (I’ve gotten reaaaaally good at troubleshooting Web design problems).
My general rule of thumb is that I design it for Firefox or Netscape first - because if it’ll run in that, it’ll run in everything.
I hate IE because it’s not secure, it’s really easy to get third-party software installed on your computer (of course, without your permission) and because Microsoft has apparently invented code all on it’s own that’s nifty, but of course will only run in IE (maybe it’s proprietary, or maybe because professional Web designers don’t go for stupid shit like blinking links unless they’re designing a site for a five year old).
~Tasha
And yet Firefox supports the nonstandard BLINK tag, but IE doesn’t.
I’ve never heard anyone complain that Firefox (or any other non-M$ browser, for that matter) was hard to code for, until now.
I use Firefox - been using it for years. I know nothing about coding/designing webpages. That said, it drives me CRAZY when webpages of huge multi-national corporations (or even large single-national corporations) pretty much say “This will work in IE only, if you have something else, DOWNLOAD IE!” I mean, with all the money these people have, they really can’t just do it properly the first time so it works for everyone?
There was one company I wanted to apply to, but whenever I wanted to open their "career’ page, they automatically did a browser check… if it wasn’t 4.0 or greater, you get a popup with “OK” as your only option. Their check didn’t care what browser you used, but it MUST be >4.0. Firefox is at, what, 1.8.x? So I click “OK”, and it reloads the page and does the check again. And when that popup is up, you can’t close the tab or browser. So somewhere in the millisecond between clicking “OK” and it reloads, you have to be able to get your mouse over to the STOP button or close the browser. If you’re not fast enough, “OK”? Fuck - pissed me off. I didn’t end up applying to their company.
OK - me again, author of OP.
So I spent the better part of the day fixing the website to work in Firefox…
One nice hint found on the Internet is: margin: 0 auto
That saved some time in getting things to center.
Then I learned all about padding - seems to have no big effect on IE, but boy does it ever flop things all over the place in Firefox.
Then I got to learn all about absolute, relative, scroll, fixed…which seems to work differently on both Firefox and IE.
And there was lot of other trial and error attempts on my part to figure out a fix for this and for that. And when I finally got it to work in Firefox, of course it looked like crap in IE, but knowing the changes I just made in Firefox, I went back and undid all sorts of things in IE - and then back again - well, you get the idea.
There are still a few things that could probably be moved a pixel or two over, but at this point, unless you look at the site with a magnifying glass, I am not going to worry about it.
Gee, was that fun. Now the other 7% or so can see the site correctly and it only took me an extra day to make it happen.
Yes, it was quite the learning experience…and I hope the next time goes smoother.
Welcome to my world of pain!
Has to be said though, sometimes it’s the only way to proceed. Certainly I got so bored of trying to get the same ajax based interface working for IE and FF I ended up doing separate pages. Then again, I’m past 30, so I’m officially too old for programming anyway…
…hang on. Oi Jjimm, how old are you now?
(Emphasis mine.)
Here’s part of your problem. Regardless of what your instructors tell you, HTML is not (and was never intended to be) a pixel-perfect page layout engine. At its core, it is little more than a document format; most of HTML’s layout features were tacked onto that. You can accomplish some pretty impressive things with it, but that will require a bit of cleverness and a LOT of experience with laying out DIVs and such.
My advice: don’t go for pixel-perfect this early in the game, just get it to look nice with minimal fuss.
Again, I’d love to see some code that works in IE but not Firefox, and what the “fix” was. Again, as Tuckerfan said, I’ve never heard of this.
DMark, I feel your pain. I’ve been working with computer technology for 20 years or so, and I have to go all the way back to COBOL on a mainframe to find an environment that wasted as much of my time as web authoring. PowerBuilder came close, but that’s for another thread.
Your frustration is valid but I think it’s misplaced. The problem is not with FireFox nor is it with IE as some have suggested. The problem, in my opinion, is with W3C, the organization responsible for defining the web standards.
What you often see as goofball mistakes in FireFox are actually behaviors that are in accordance to the W3C standards.
What follows next is speculation, but since this is the pit…
From what I can tell, W3C never bothered to do any usability testing as they went along, thinking instead that the purity of their model was good enough. If actual human beings didn’t think the same way as their model was structured, then it was the human beings fault. My guess is that the IE developers looked at some of the stuff that was coming out of W3C, thought to themselves, “This can’t be right”, and came up with their own standards thinking they were big enough to have everyone else come over to their way of thinking. If that had actually worked we’d all be in a better place now, but it didn’t, so we’re in the mess we’re in. (Hmmm… anyone else see any parallels to Iraq?)
Normally when technology is poorly designed like this market forces take care of it, but there are no market forces at work here. If you don’t like the W3C standards, then you’re out of luck. There’s not another company out there with a different set of standards. Not even MS.
If you’re unhappy with the way things are in the world of web authoring, then I encourage you to tell it to W3C. My understanding is that they are unlikely to care what you think, but at least your effort is being directed to the right place.
In the early 1990s, there were a few alternatives for better-UI navigation of the Internet. The market chose the Web, and has not found it useful to support more than one method. We could have more than one set of electrical and telelphone distribution protocols, but it would cause more problems that it solves. The current push to adhere to “web standards” comes from a similar feeling about the Web.
Actually, the W3C is one of the most laid-back organizations I’ve ever seen.They never issue “standards”, they issue “recommendations”, and most of those are a suggested framework within which to create your own stuff.Tim Berners-Lee is an open-sourcer of the highest order. The first entry of his blog states:
HTML and XML were developed straight from SGML, the accepted standard for electronic documentation of text at the time the Web was being developed. All of the HTML recommendations give very minimal presentation suggestions, and the CSS recommendations provide a “default” stylesheet" for HTML based on observations of existing browser practice.
The failure of the same page to render identically in separate browsers stems partly from this flexibility in the recommendations, and partly from browsers introducing proprietary behavior, some of which is not compliant with those recommendations, some of which is simply in addition to them.
The problem comes not from the W3C recommendations, it comes from browser producers lying in their marketing material about their level of compliance with those recommendations. MS is the worst in my experience, although Mozilla is culpable to some extent as well (they have no support for the <object> tag, preferring Netscape’s old <embed> element, for example).
The market favored Netscape for several years, then IE for several (largely due to MS’s manipulation of that market), and is now making room again for Netscape technology in the form of the Firefox browser. Web designers can’t demand that the market atrophy, they simply must roll with the changes lest their pages lose favor.
This is how I explain IE’s broken box model. I think the MS guys got it “right”, and the W3C folks were off their rocker. I mean, to this here dumb webpage guy, it makes sense to include all the the box - minus the margins - within the box’s height and width. The W3C method leaves you scrambling to guess where the borders are actually going to go. To do it “right” you need to fall back on client-side scripting, which has its own set of problems. (And don’t get me started on the fact that, to create any kind of decent website, you need to be proficient in not one but five programming languages: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, server-side script (PHP, etc.) and SQL. And three of them were, theoretically, designed to be run together in the same process - why not make the languages more similar? Blech.)
Oh… I said MS got it right. :smack: glances upward looking for lightning
Why is your site all CSS-y, based off CssZenGarden? Does your class require you to use all CSS for placement? Are HTML tables taboo these days? Maybe you’re making it too hard on yourself by using all CSS. Tables have feelings too.
That may be true, but then MS should have just said that IE supported MS’s Enhanced CSS or some such, the same way they did with DHMTL. To do things your own way, even if it makes more sense, and then claim you’re fully supporting someone else’s standards in order to lend their good name to yours is simply disingenuous.