Browser Dependence Day

Browser Dependence

Yes, the play on words is intentional. As I write this post it is "Independce Day" in America, July 4th. Yet when it comes to working with the web we find we are still very dependent. Here is a question for everyone.

Is there anyone out there besides me who is still not free from issues based on what browser you are using?

The Little Pictures

OK, veterans can skip this chapter but the rest should read it. When we build a web site it has to run in a way that works for the whole world. You have Mac Users, Windows Users, Linux Users... and then you have many operating systems on each machine, AND you have have many browsers and versions of browsers! Getting your stuff to run on all of the machines is possible but there is of course the issue of the return on this investment. How do you conquer this? Well, it will be different from one company to the next. You could go out and buy enough machines to test all of these use case instances but that would be a great investment in terms of space, time and maintenance. Just imagine trying to keep all those machines virus free! So at the end of the day the big picture is all the little pictures that tell the true story of how dependent our design is and how successful we are with that design.

The First Solution

Now... to the better solutions. My first suggestion is to go to something like Browser Shots where you can get a view of how your site will look on about any browser out there. This is a great service and it is not anything new. Yet, how many of us are taking the time to do this? Many of us that are reading this blog will note that we are code developers and not designers. Well, in that case it is even more important for us to learn to use a tool like this. We don't deal with the design aspects of HTML and CSS enough to know the issues with all the different browsers.

The Second Solution

There are many versions of this solution and they basically end up being called by two names. Layouts and Skins. We could test every last page we deliver to our customers from our web sites but this would take a solution to a problem and trade the old problem for a bigger problem. Our return on investment would likely get worse and not better. This is why we need to skin our web sites. By creating common look and feel solutions that can be impressed on page content from one page to the next we make fixes and investment much better. The topic is far to big for this post but it should help us to get thinking in the right direction. It also would be a failure if we failed to mention that because without it again this solution would turn into another problem. ColdFusion and other application servers have ways to make skinning and templates work. Watch for more blogs on those subjects later.

By the way... hope here and abroad your holiday and or week end is great!

Happy 4th of July!