Web Design & SEO Blog, Inverness Blogs

This week I successfully completed the fairly standard but neat-looking website for my wife’s business soXby Creations.

As a web designer, I don’t just interest myself in pretty pictures (although I do like pretty pictures), but also in the HTML, the CSS, PHP and JavaScript of it all. Design (Appearance) and Coding (Part appearance, part functionality).

Our coding is governed by coding standards – this is supposed to ensure that whatever platform (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux etc) and whichever browser (Firefox, Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome etc) websites are viewed in that they actually appear consistent, the aim being that the browser provides other functionality, plug-ins, personalisation, whatever tickles your fancy. A website is a website is a website – i.e. you get one built and your audience from around the globe get the same service. Right? Well… almost. Possibly.

I have long used Mozilla Firefox for my websites. Okay it uses up a few more system resources, but I have a good laptop in front of me so I’m not that fussed. It’s Open Source, which I also support. But I accept the fact that not everyone has my taste in browser. Fair enough.

So any site I build I test in about 5 mainstream browsers. Firefox was fine, as was Safari and Google Chrome. Opera seems to want to render the colours differently to the others, but that’s out of my control and I can live with that (sort of). Then a friend messages me on Facebook just to show me a screenshot of this lovely site in Internet Explorer 7. Layers were all messed up and nothing was in its rightful place.

Internet Explorer 7 was the 7th browser created by those on high in Microsoft which ignores coding standards. For so long I had to code for IE7 and below until they finally released Internet Explorer 8 and it was a big selling point that they were now W3C standards compliant.

Now do excuse me for sitting on my high horse, but surely standards should be, well, standard? Thankfully, when logging onto my Windows partition on my laptop, the site looked fine in Internet Explorer 8. Out of the 26 unique visitors to mOxby Design in the last month, only 3 used IE7, the rest were on IE8. Thank Goodness.

So Microsoft finally acknowledged what we knew all along with the release of IE8 and that’s the fact that we must acknowledge cross-platform standards. IE8′s been around for a while now but guess what? Simple things like a picture preview pane that sits in the top middle and moves with the scrollbar? Worked fine with all browsers except IE8, because Internet Explorer doesn’t give items on the page the same references (aka the ‘DOM’ or Document Object Model) so I had to add extra lines of JavaScript to the site.

When will the guys at MS finally cotton on and stop making us website developers do their own coding for them?

About Martin Oxby

I am a web designer based in Inverness, where I live and work with my wife Samantha. We are also active in our Church - Christ Church Inverness.