Thursday, December 14, 2006

They're called Standards for a reason.

I'm not talking about Standards of living or quality of food. No, I'm talking about Internet Standards, specifically those used in the definition of web pages.

If anyone has ever written a website will tell you, conforming to the Standards set by the W3C should ensure that your site looks and functions the same way in every web browser. I could use some colourful expletives at this point, but you get the idea.

Each and every browser does things in a slightly different way. To combat this, the W3C invented The Acid Test and Acid Test2. These tests are designed to show how well a browser conforms to the Standards set by the W3C. The web browser that is used the most, Internet Explorer (IE), does the worst. Firefox performs reasonably well, whilst Opera passes Acid Test2 with flying colours.

Why am I so concerned about this? I'm writing a web site. It is getting increasingly frustrating that the site functions perfectly in all browsers except, yes you guessed it, IE.

After repeatedly bashing my head against the wall, I have decided to use JavaScript to detect which browser is being used and make subtle changes to ensure that it does work in every browser.

Apparently, many of the bugs in IE have been fixed with the release of version 7. Sorry Microsoft, but you're a little late. The Alpha release of Firefox 3 passes Acid Test2 and it's going to be some time before Microsoft update IE as it is still tied into the Windows OS. Ah well, they'll learn eventually.

till next time,

Alex.

No comments: