Are you coding HTML for Firefox and Opera?

[Hell Puppy]

Originally posted by RawAlex@Jul 29 2004, 10:42 AM
IE being forgiving is just a way of saying "Microfloss likes bad code".

I switched to firefox, which is shipped WITHOUT java, and without any of the plugins. You install an actual real version of Sun Java, and guess what, all those stupid IE downloading hacks don't work anymore.

The gonzo thread, guess what, I clicked it - without fear. Nothing on my machine.

Alex

That's the exact reason there seems to be a slight momentum shift already. It hasn't hit the masses yet, it's not showing in stats, but lots of people i know, talk to and do business with day to day have switched to either Opera or Firefox just to avoid the toolbar slams and such.

Microsoft has always promoted sloppy code at every level. Forget about html for a moment. Take a programmer who cut his teeth on Microsoft C+ and C++ compilers and drop a project that requires ANSI C+ or ANSI C++ and watch the results. He'll never get all of the warnings out of the compile...if he gets it to compile at all. Makes for a friendly compiler for Microsoft, but the guy who learned C+ and C++ correctly can code on any platform.

If you code correctly to begin with, you wont have many problems. A good example is the "valign" command on table cells. If you do not specify one, MSIE defaults to "top". Opera and Firefox default to "middle" per W3C. If you dont specify valign but depend on top alignment, your page will not look right in anything other than IE.

What I'm finding is a lot of designers we've used depend on things like ImageReady and the code these packages produce is tailored to IE and not W3C.

I'm checking new pages closely to save potential pains down the road.