Surviving Internet Explorer – Embracing Standards in Web Design

Designing a web site is a complicated process. Once you have identified the need, the audience and the pieces that connect the two, it is time to focus on implementation. A web page’s layout is a delicate dance of content sections whose relationships are determined by a set of display rules called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The CSS specifications are maintained by the W3C, the standards organization who brought us the web technologies (HTML, XML, etc.) which define the Internet. With a set of carefully defined rules provided by a thoughtful organization which provides tools to verify compliance with the standards, a common marketplace has been created which allows for the user to have a multitude of choices regarding the vendor of their transportation while maintaining the ability to operate across the vast array of possible destinations. This allows a designer to define the relationships between objects without concern for the user’s platform, because the user’s platform with interpret the information in a predictable fashion thanks to the clearly defined standards.

This idyllic view is unfortunately not how we live today, though we have come very far from our turbulent past. The first browser war ended the rivalry between Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer that drove the initial innovation on the web. A lack of competition led to stagnation, which stifled the next several years of web development. Today, we are in the midst of the second browser war, which is defined by innovation, standards compliance, and performance. Driven in part by the “Acid tests“, the web technologies which push the envelope are now able to enter the mainstream consciousness. Nevertheless, the reigning family of browsers (Internet Explorer) has been content to plod along at a snail’s pace, releasing their first Acid 2 compliant browser (IE8) while Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Opera’s self-titled browser were working on Acid3 compliance. To this day, Internet Explorer (all supported versions) remains the only popular browser to ever score less than 40/100 on the Acid3 test (IE8 scores 20/100 whereas the other four all score higher than 84/100).

While the old guard is slow to adapt, there is hope! A well designed system should be targetted at the standards compliant browsers. This allows you the greatest versatility, cross-browser interoperability and helps to future-proof your creation by allowing the browsers to behave properly and maintain your original design. By creating content and supporting structures which meet the requirements set forth by standards organizations, we can ensure our learning delivery mechanisms will be intact because browsers which implement the specifications will correctly render it throughout time. When you choose to venture outside of clearly defined recommendations to support the gotchas of IE8 and its ilk, you must be as precise as a laser, targeting the offending idiosyncrasy and instructing it to behave in a predictable fashion.