Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

Here’s to a resounding “maybe”! That’s right - it may or may not, and here’s why:

Internet Explorer has the majority of the web browser market - but it doesn’t yet meet industry standards for rendering your website. Internet Explorer 7.0 is more standards compliant than Internet Explorer 6.0.

(There are a LOT of other browsers available, too - IE for the Mac, Safari, Opera, and several others -so what follows isn’t a complete list!)

(And what exactly ARE those standards? Stay tuned - that’s for another posting - for now - we’re talking about implementing your visual design, not about searchability or accessibility!)

Mozilla Firefox 2.0 IS standards compliant, though - so most coders (NPower Seattle included) START by making sure that your website is code compliant. Unfortunately, that also means that once we make your website look great in Firefox - we have to “break” the code to make it render decently in other browsers.

Plone lets us do some clever coding tricks that help a little, particularly with IE 7. We can tell Plone to use a special style sheet if it “sniffs” your computer and knows that you are using IE7. Or IE6. Or any other browser for that matter - but as you add more stylesheets to create and maintain - you drive up your cost and potentially complicate future upgrades.

IE6 is a different matter - we have to insert non-standard code along with the good stuff to make it work with IE6 - and sometimes that means that we have to compromise in one browser or the other.

What does this mean for you?

1. If NPower Seattle is creating your website using Plone - we’ll ensure that it looks great in Firefox, looks very good in IE7, and renders decently in IE6. You can ask us to make additional adjustments if you’d like - but that kind of tuning can be expensive.
2. If you are working with another vendor, ask them for a browser compatibility statement so you know how your website will render in different browsers.
3. If you have a complicated visual design, have an audience using many different browsers, budget extra (and ongoing!) time for browser compatibility testing.