Building sites with standards...
airup (22 points) | Wed, 2005-07-20 16:24I want to know the general feeling from everyone about this. I spent all last week hand-coding a site that met standards. It met the W3 standards for HTML and CSS, but did not display in Windows IE6. So I had to put forth a bunch of hacks and messy code to get it working.
There is really no way around this I suppose. I presented it to the company this morning and they loved it, but it doesn't meet the standards and I am annoyed that this is now the standard practice for me.
Anyone have any success stories / news of hope on this topic?
On a random side-note, I made sure everyone in the office switched to firefox. I literally went to every computer and walked them through it. Spent an hour doing this, met every employee of the company, and did my part to make IE the minority browser.
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The only advice I can give is to persevere. It took me months to get my brain into working the compliant way but now its second nature and I think about how i will build it from early scamps through to concepting right up to the final code.
From my experience there is always a way round a situation to make it standards compliant and view in IE, you might need to use a couple of accepted hacks but that's par for the course until either M$ disappears into a black hole or Firefox becomes the dominant browser (neither likely).
Also don't get too hung up on complying with W3C standards I only use them as a guide. You should concentrate on creating good semantic code that's aimed at accessibility and giving you options in the future,
Good work on getting everyone to convert to Firefox. Tried that in my office and everyone thought I was a loon!
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http://mijlee.com
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You may want to check out IE7 as a quick solution. I've not tested it yet, but heard good things about it.
BTW. this site is not working on IE6 properly, but I realize it's not a good idea to keep it this way...
I'm using it at work...and I'm loving it. I still love firefox too, but IE7 is better for internal security stuff.
Major improvement...finally!
The biggest headache with CSS is IE. Stick with standards though, it will become easier as
I would say keep your designs and code as simple as possible, but you have to support IE6, just too many people use it as much as we can convert 1 user at a time... The best thing I did was to organise your hacks and split your css files out, so IE specific hacks have their own special place. Check out Mr Bowman
Have a good look at: Position is everything. Depressing but inspiring all the same.
Right now i'm workin on a website for a music band, i'm building it with all the standarts(xhtml 1.0 and css1) and it's a pain to make it work on ie. I wait for the official IE7 release, this mean that many people will update, so those css hacks for ie will be unnecisary.
i hope so...
//Static
So today I switched host for hopefully the last time. Pretty interesting, the hosting company provides a months free hosting if you are using the firefox browser...
Very interesting to me (and a months free hosting). And if anyone wants a review of this host after a month, e-mail me.
Go with what claypole says. Keep your code really simple. Especially the HTML, the more you style and layout with CSS the easier it is to control.
The one piece of advice that I'll give is to separate width, height and border settings from margin, padding and styling. Give a surrounding DIV width and border values but leave the padding to elements inside preferably semantic code not spans.
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http://mijlee.com
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this is the first time i use full css for site styling, then i showed up the mockup tu the "client" he told me to use other font for the paragraph text, i just had to change the font family in the css and voila, if i were using html styling for all it woul be a good waste of time!
//Static
I have been checking this site out for a month or so and monitoring the RSS feed. I really dig it, lot's of fresh takes on a varied array of topics.
Back on topic. I'd like to let anyone listening know that this *is* possible...
I work with an 11 person team of Production Assistants that hand code xhtml transitional, CSS 2.0, fully validated, cross browser (IE 5.01, 5.5 & 6, FFx 1.0 & Saf 2.0) table-less CSS layout sites daily... and we do it without IE7 and with very few of only the most accepted "hacks". Also, these are not "web standard" looking sites... they are fully customized designs, each one.
Why? Because of sooo many reasons not related to money... but sometimes it does come down to the cash and after a transition period of about 3 months, it has been cost effective... not only in the production of the sites in man hours (yes, it literally can be faster than using Fireworks and it's sloppy nested-nested-table code) but also in maintenance costs down the line. Repeatable, reusable, practically recyclable code has helped us tremendously. It was not easy and there were some bumps along the road, but we made the transition last summer and have never looked back.
How? Many hours of trial and error by a couple of our best guys, mostly at home in their spare time. It is a task not to be taken lightly, CSS can beat you down like a mule tied around your neck with a rattlesnake in your mouth... but it can be done. More and more people are doing it... go ahead, just try a little bit and see if you don't get hooked. There are a ton of good resources out there like:
http://csszengarden.com/
http://www.jasonsantamaria.com/
http://www.positioniseverything.net/
http://www.stopdesign.com/ (Douglas Bowman as mentioned above)
http://www.meyerweb.com/
http://happycog.com/ (Zeldman)
...just to name a few. Good luck!
...and btw - I have no idea where that mule/rattlesnake reference came from... maybe it was http://redneckwordsofwisdom.com/ , although not a good example of CSS layout/standards, hehe.
-Mike
[edit: grammer and spelling oversight]