Monthly Archives: February 2003

Not this time Jeffrey

Monday February 10th 2003

Never thought I’d say this, but I disagree with something on Jeffrey Zeldman’s site!

I give you this quote: “Site owners, if your agency or in-house team is sniffing browsers to send them different CSS files, they?re wasting your money and laying the groundwork for compatibility problems that will bite you down the road.”

For the most part, if you’re working to a deadline for a client then you get the job done no matter what it takes. If that means sniffing for the browser and sending different css, html, whatever, then so be it. As any working web developer/designer knows – there isn’t really such a thing as “laying the groundwork for compatibility problems that will bite you down the road.”

With sites ageing in dog years, the chances are high that the site will be re-designed all over again before the current breed of browsers gets too far down the food chain.

I’m all for css based design. That’s why the right hand menu of this site is perfect in IE, a few pixels high in Mozilla, a few pixels more in Opera, and why I couldn’t give a crap what it’s doing in Netscape. Jeffrey is expecting us to put hacks into our style sheets in order to fool different browsers into taking different values for position of elements.

But I think this is going down the same road as invisible pixel hacks in table based layouts. Might as well sniff for the browser and send it the right style sheet rather than resort to intricate css hacks.

Two Weeks Notice

Sunday February 9th 2003

Went to see this at the weekend. Quite an enjoyable film, although I couldn’t help thinking that in the quest to avoid using any romantic comedy cliché’s the movie felt quite disjointed in places.

Hugh Grant was Hugh Grant – same old same old, and Sandra Bullock was her usual quirky self and the combination of the two made for some quite amusing moments.

On the downside, the product placement was hardly subtle. In one scene Sandra is sitting at a table ready to represent the absent Hugh in his divorce settlement. Absolutely out of nowhere she says “Is there any more Diet Coke?” There is no can of Diet Coke on the table, nor is there any action taken on her request before Hugh enters the room and the scene carries on regardless. It’s almost cringe making when it sticks out as badly as that, although fortunately there aren’t too many instances of it in the rest of the movie (save the “Volvo” set piece).

Nice film… happy ending, seven out of ten on the rom-com scale.

No surprise that they’re still at it

Friday February 7th 2003

Micro$oft are still filtering for non-MSIE browsers at MSN and sending them a style sheet which messes up the display of the page.

Only a short while since they laughed off the US Department of Justice case against them for anti-competitive practices, is it really any surprise at all that MicroSoft are still at it?

Not to me, and I’m starting to wonder if switching to Opera as my default browser isn’t such a bad idea after all. This is the wrong time for MicroSoft to be playing games, really – Mac users are probably stampeding to use the new Safari browser and PC users have been making do with the limited features of IE6 for some time now. (The new Opera 7 leaves it standing feature wise.)

After five years with Internet Explorer at the top of the pile… maybe it’s time for a revolution.