Some intresting things in the web stats. Turns out that only 50.6% of my visitors use IE of some variety. So if I was a dweeb and designed for IE only, i’d be completely screwing over 49.4% of my visitors. Now thats a lot, but still only percentages. In normal terms thats 7072 hits or about 62 people each month being pissed off that my site doesn’t work in their browser.
Speaking of standards, I hear that Designing With Web Standards is a very good book, and for probably the first time ever I’m quite looking forward to buyin a book. I’ve read a bit of Zeldman’s site and he has similar ideas to me about the web, so it’ll be a good read me thinks. Apparently its not mind blowing if you’ve been around for a while, but it’ll be good to sort out my head i think on CSS / XHTML as I’m still a bit hazy about a few things. For example, in designing the new LSR site I discovered a really nice glitch in the box model in pretty much all browsers. You can’t really do the auto vertical height thing you can with tables. There is a work around via javascript, but it would be a lot nicer to have it just work. Now, given the recent statement by Microsoft, that IE for Mac is dead and that they’re also killing of IE for Windows life is gunna suck browser wise for a while. All those peeps saying “IE rules!! Design for IE cos it works!!” are dumb, as if they try and actually make a good site it they’ll find the problems as I did. Its gunna be a case of fixing things to work in IE when they work fine in Opera or Mozilla. Total flipside to 4yrs ago.
“In other words, for the next two years, 85% of the web using population will have buggy support for CSS float, no support at all for adjacent sibling selectors, and no hope of PNG transparency unless developers are willing to write proprietary, IE-only code or deploy sophisticated JavaScript workarounds to make IE/Win do what other modern browsers do natively. Not to mention IE/Win ’s known caching problems with background images and its insistence on displaying the a:active state even when a link is no longer active. Can anyone tell us how two more years of flawed standards support is supposed to be a good thing?” – Zeldman