Rants & Raves

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November 01, 2001  Woes of Browser Compatibility

I just spent quite of bit of time working on a family website where, for the first time, I made a real effort to make sure that the pages looked good in Netscape as well as IE. I had to. My mom sent me an email saying that each successive paragraph on the main page got progressively bigger until they were too big to fit on a page. She was using Netscape 4.7, and I realized that I hadn't looked at any of my sites with anything other than IE. I downloaded Netscape versions 4.7 and 6.2 to take a look. Cleaning up the mess was NOT a pleasant experience. Javascript code that works in IE and Netscape 4.7 now no longer works in Netscape 6.2. I can understand incompatibility with older browsers, but newer ones? And CSS (cascading style sheets) gets interpreted differently in all three. Fortunately, I have a sympathetic cousin who works in web design. He sent me the following which I thought all you web developers might enjoy:

1. ANY browser should be able to access the content of the site.


2. Rule 1 does NOT imply that the site should look the same in each browser.
3. If something non-essential does not work in a certain browser, Too Bad For That Browser.
4. Always check style sheets in Netscape 4 first. Style sheets may break in most browsers, but if they break in Netscape 4, they break really spectacularly.
5. Know when to stop. Sometimes, trying to apply a particular style is just more trouble than it's worth.

My mom's experience with the increasing font size was evidence of rule #4. It turned out that 4.7 doesn't let you get away with not closing your paragraph tags if you are going to use CSS. By the way, the ordered list above does not display properly in 4.7, so I am hereby invoking rule #5.

I have to disagree with Leo's assertion on last night's show that losing support for older hardware is the price you have to pay for greater stability. A caller with a Microtek parallel port scanner couldn't get drivers for it for Windows XP. He couldn't even get Windows 2000 drivers for it, which is usually a way around this type of problem. There's no reason why Microtek couldn't get drivers written for newer operating systems. I could understand if this involved five year old hardware, but Microtek was selling parallel port scanners as recently as 1999. I know because I have one myself. I don't think we would tolerate it if we could no longer buy replacement parts for cars more than three years old. I guess a particular company's history of OS upgrade support should be a consideration when evaluating hardware.

Posted by Christy on November 01, 2001 10:02 PM

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