Web Browser Standards
I’ve been working on a web-based booking system for the past six months for the Calgary Flying Club. It’s a part-time project, hense the long development time frame, with work being done here and there as free time in evening and weekends becomes available. Of all the web applications I’ve worked on in the past, most have always been about content and although they were clean and easy to use, they didn’t use anything fancy HTML-wise. This web booking system however, is the first application where the things we are doing are pushing the standards envelope.
We’re actually not push the envelope much, but it’s enough to produce results that are… irritating. For example, when specifying the size of an object, one browser will include the border in that size and another won’t. So if you have a 2 pixel border, one browser will display that object 4 pixels wider (2 pixels on either side) that the other. I don’t know which way is the proper, standard-specified way nor do I care. All I care about are browsers that follow standards.
Unfortunately, it’s not ever likely to happen that all browsers will follow all standards. That means that you either have to develop for the lowest common denominator (for the browsers you wish to support) or you have to single out one or two browsers and force people to use those. I’m not a fan of the latter at all. For those of us using Linux or using a non-IE browser (or both), we’ve faced that problem for many years. But things are looking up. Microsoft has lost market share to Firefox over the past year and I’m encountering fewer and fewer websites and apps that “require” Internet Explorer.
For the booking system we chose a fairly conservative ’middle’ ground; we recommend Firefox or Internet Explorer, support a handful of other popular browsers (such as Opera and Konqueror) and have documented what works and what doesn’t on the majority of the other popular browsers (such as Safari or Lynx). We’ve pushed Firefox as the browser of choice, but only because it truly supports the latest standards and because the developers responsible for it are continually upgrading it and fixing bugs (unlike Microsoft, who haven’t upgraded IE for the past couple years).
Fri, 23 Sep 2005 03:55 Posted in Technology
