Looking back is not the future

Take a look at my website in IE7, it looks wrong, probably looks even worse in IE6. I know it looks wrong and because I want it to be right, it plays on my mind.

So, why don’t I sort it?, well, firstly I do that a lot, I do a lot of pixel nudging to make things look identical in all browsers as part of my day job – there’s nothing wrong with that, I’ve always had to do it at every job i’ve worked at and secondly because it’s my client’s expectation (most of the time); but when I come home, the last thing I care about is making my site look the same in Safari and a browser which, is 4, 5 or even 8 years old.

Hacks and fixes, whatever you want to call them aren’t a good thing, they were never claimed to be, but it’s sometimes the norm to put them in just to cover your bases when thinking backwards about what browsers you want to support, but why? why are we bothering with these kinds of issues when instead of thinking backwards we should be thinking forwards to what we can do to improve a website, to make it a better experience for users.

I’ve noticed recently that if I’m tasked with building a website that has to look the same in every browser (including IE6), the site seems to lack that bit of extra quality straight away from something that you might want to build simply for more modern browsers, they seem to look a bit flat, and a bit lifeless, there are many reasons for this, some of these are that you’re looking at using no transparent imagery (unless you use heavy PNG fixes), if the site design had rounded corners then you will have to use images and normally around 3 extra DIV’s in your page (top, middle and bottom images) instead of using the already extremely useful border-radius property as well as the already mentioned ton of hacks/fixes that you can probably reel out off the top of your head and not to forget Conditional comments – ugh, it’s all just extra code and extra files.

JavaScript too, JS has come a long way, jQuery is awesome, but do we need it all the time, it’s fairly large in scale and jQuery in particular is getting bigger with every single release. My site doesn’t use it, I just used some transitions instead – part and parcel of CSS3, simples, IE users won’t see those though, not unless it’s a modern version such as 9, but big whoop, you wouldn’t know they were there anyway would you if you viewed everything in IE7?

They never existed in the eyes of that web user.

Wouldn’t it be nice to open up Safari or your other favourite modern browser; hand-code your website from scratch, add in all that new stuff you’ve been wanting to use such as border-radius and transitions and when you’re happy with the results, THEN go back and take a look in older browsers and worry about it from there? I would say so. It may seem more time consuming, but your website will also look a hell of a lot better in browsers where it should look better.

Mobile developers/designers have been saying this for a while, you don’t want to start thinking about your friends old Nokia phone and how your mobile site will look on that when you have the iPhone, Android and modern Blackberries to play around with, that would be silly wouldn’t it? So what’s the problem with doing this for desktop websites?

My website will continue to look wrong in IE7, this isn’t a protest against IE, not like a lot of people out there, I’m just happy with how my website looks in the browsers I think people should be using at this time in the Internets lifetime.

I had my first internet experience using Internet Explorer, i’m sure most people did too (whether they’d like to admit it or not), so let’s not forget what it’s done and what it could do back then, it just hasn’t managed to keep up the pace with companies such as Mozilla who are constantly changing the game and improving their browsers with every release – hopefully Microsoft can get back on the wagon with their next release and I can expect my site to look inline with everything else without having to look back.