Lets get a few things straight about web design & development.
- It’s quite a pain to get things looking correct in all the different browsers.
- IE really sucks, all around.
- I cannot stand IE.
- Some quirks really suck in other browsers also.
- see a trend?
Last week Dave Hyatt anounced that since Safari v2.0 it has had the support for multiple background images just as the CSS v3 spec calls for. I em excited about what this makes possible in Safari, but it really puts the rest of the world behind in terms of display properties. I wish I lived in a world where web designers could only design with one browser in mind but this just doesn’t happen. Even on some of the intra-net projects that I have worked on you still have several browsers to contend with. And unfortunatly those are usually ones taht are a little more behind the times compared to Safari.
The question has been out there in the web design world for some time as to wether we should use these cutting edge techniques and just have the display of the web page decay in browsers that don’t support these (prospective) standards or even the confirmed standards that only a select few browsers support. I have elected to allow this to happen on my personal (this site) web site because, as I state in the about page, this is a place that I experiment with different designs and techniques. However, I feel, on any client work, I typically steer away from using these bleeding edge techniques. Instead I shoot for the most commonly supported properties and use several hacks (Filtering CSS
) to siphen out the css that some browsers can’t or won’t handle.