Re: wine and IE
-- Paul Johnson <baloo@ursine.dyndns.org> wrote
(on Wednesday, 19 February 2003, 10:15 PM -0800):
> On Tue, Feb 18, 2003 at 03:07:59PM -0600, DvB wrote:
> > I've never done this, but I've seen it done (with me own eyes! :-) I
> > don't think it worked as well as the native Linux browsers and probably
> > would crash as soon as it started doing its Direct-X crap but, for your
> > purposes, it would probably work (one would assume you do standards
> > compliant development).
>
> Well, if that's the assumption, why bother getting IE to work at all?
> If you go to the standard, and it works in one browser, than
> it'll work anywhere. Save yourself the trouble. 8:o)
Because IE has around 90% share of the browser market -- if it doesn't
work on IE, you lose your audience.
And, contrary to popular belief (hint: sarcasm!) coding
standards-compliant HTML and CSS does not mean that if "it works in one
browser, than[sic] it'll work anywhere." Not all browsers implement
standards the same or correctly -- and, with the number of older
browsers out there, you have to be worried also about graceful
degradation of the code so that bugs in older browsers don't make a site
unreadable.
For instance, I recently ran into a bug with IE 5 whereby setting a
margin (using standards-compliant CSS) on an unordered list caused it to
float top left in the window, overlapping the rest of the content; had I
not seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have known it could happen.
(Those interested in a solution, google for "tantek hack".)
So, basically, the more browsers and platforms I can view a website in,
the more information I have for making sure it displays in a reasonable
fashion. (Which does *not* mean looking the same everywhere! I simply
mean that all content is visible and readable.) This is the whole point
of trying to get at least *a* version of IE up and running on my
machine.
--
Matthew Weier O'Phinney
matthew@weierophinney.net
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