Omega Cottage Occasional Blog

I decided to try and refresh my web site this week as everyone was away on holiday. On my main computer I have two versions of Internet Explorer, Avant, Opera, Mozilla, Google Chrome and Safari. When I build a page I always check it in all of them as you wouldn't believe the mess the page can be in as the different browsers interpret the code differently.


I am using IE 8 on my main machine now and at last it seems Microsoft have at last brought out a browser that is standards compliant. Now when you change the pages style sheet you have a good idea of what will appear on the page and borders, margins and padding all display as they should. It is also good that when you then open the page in Mozilla or Opera the page is relatively unchanged.


However the same can not be said for IE7 or IE6. Looking at my site in IE7 showed all the margins and padding were slightly out of place. That was annoying but I could live with it. When I looked again in IE6 the whole page was corrupt with menus twice the width they should be and forms were moved right across the page (I was using the DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional DOM and CSS 2.1). I fiddled with the CSS and XHTML for a while then went to look at the Browser stats on W3C.
I was interested to read that IE6 has dropped away to less than 17% of Internet Browsers.

That means that 1 in 6 people can not see my page as I would wish. Is that a low enough number to ignore? What do you think? You can leave your vote by clicking on the Comments link at the bottom of this post. In the meantime I will carry on trying to find a way to make the code look the same in every one of the popular browsers.

The publisher I do occasional work for has managed to get some of the books off to the printer. We have missed the deadline for the major conferences but there are a lot of orders on the system for these books so it wasn't wasted effort. Due to all the holdups we have had to have a hard think about how to process a book from authors script to printer ready files. Hopefully the next book to go through the system will not have so many holdups along the way.