Gadgetopia

Are you paying someone to make web pages?

By now I’m sure that everyone is sick of hearing web people wail and moan about how much they hate IE. But the sad truth is that aside from giving your security guy nightmares, and serving as the source of a lot of snide remarks from your latte-drinking, ironic-t-shirt-wearing web developers, IE is costing you a lot of money.

Here’s a perfect example: This morning after I put on my most ironic t-shirt and drank my latte (OK, coffee and a sweater - I’m an older web developer), I went to work on a client’s web site.

My current workflow on a site goes something like this: First, I code the markup of the page so that it makes sense and looks good if you pull it up in lynx or some other text-only browser. No presentation in the markup, just structure. Then I crack open FireFox and work up a stylesheet with the excellent Web Developer Extension.

Now you have a great looking, standards compliant site. The site’s structure (in the HTML) is completely separate from the presentation (in the CSS). As a web developer, I’ve done a good job for my client. I used tools that let me do a very efficient job. This site will be easy to change later, and it looks great in almost every browser.

Almost every browser. It’s at this point tht the clock stops on what my client should have had to pay for the design of their web site, in my view. From here on in, they’re paying the Microsoft Lazy Tax, imposed by Microsoft for their lazy job in adherence to the standards.

Invariably, IE won’t render the stylesheet properly. So, I start by using a conditional comment block to hide a second, IE-only stylesheet that corrects most of the major IE issues. This usually does the trick.

Unfortunately, this morning I ran aground on the dreaded ‘three pixel jog’ bug, one of a whole array of gremlins IE will throw at you when you step away from the old ‘tables-and-spacer-graphics’ methods of development. I was forced to spend at least an hour chasing down this three-pixel offset. None of the known workarounds did the trick, I finally had to mangle up my HTML in order to get rid of the issue. By the time the site looked OK in IE, I had blown an additional two hours of my time and my client’s money. I had also put a hack in the HTML, that, while not completely dreadful, will probably have to be dealt with in the future should the site design change.

I hate billing clients for this ‘IE cleanup’, but it has to be done, since most of the world uses IE, and their sites have to look good. If I go back to the old methods (tables and spacers), though, I’m doing the clients an even greater disservice, since their sites are less usable, and will cost more to work on the next time.

When you hear developers bemoaning IE, it’s not just a case of primadonna webheads whining about the blasphemy of the precious standards. Personally, I’m not uptight about the violation of this notion of ‘ideal standards’. I’m mad because I had to spend your money fixing something that Microsoft broke, when I could have been making you something cool instead.

Comments

Add a Comment

Name:

URL:

Comment:

Markdown is enabled in comments. If you have to use HTML, we allow A HREF, B, BR, P, STRONG, EM, UL, LI, and BLOCKQUOTE.

 

Comments on this site are subject to our Terms of Service