Different strokes for different folks
Posted by johnnie
I’m writing this post from my mum’s computer. I’m back in Yorkshire over the weekend, for a friend’s 21st birthday party, and I’m taking the opportunity to get some work hours in whilst Laura’s in Leeds (buying a present for the afore-mentioned party – we’re really not too organised about these things). Actually, I kind of feel like I’ve broken in to the house. Both parents are away for the weekend (it’s their wedding anniversay), so I’ve let myself in. The cats don’t know what’s going on – they haven’t seen me for months.
So, like I said, using my mum’s PC. It’s a fairly standard PC World-a-like, with winxp home installed. As you might expect, the pre-installed software is still in place. She browses the net with an unpatched copy of IE6 and uses Outlook Express for her email (automatically configured by her ISP). The thing is, some of my favourite websites look totally different on this machine.
It’s just lots of little things that add up to change the appearance of certain sites. Some common fonts (including Verdana, bizzarly) aren’t installed on this machine. The color balance on the monitor is all over the place. IE has its font size turned up and a weird spyware toolbar takes up half the screen estate. All these things combined can break even the most resolute site design. I’ve just taken a look at some of my sites (fixed and fluid) and, yes, them’s oogly.
I like to think that I write sites that degrade fairly well. The ones I just looked at … well, they were still usable, so in that sense they weren’t broken, but the layout, design and typography had been interpretted in ways that I just hadn’t anticipated. Eventually it gets to the stage where you can’t write code to cover every situation (at least not without writing a bloated, kludge-fille codebase that does more harm than good) – every designer knows this. It’s an unavoidable consequence of the limitated cross-platform support for CSS2, particularly under IE. I have no real choice but to accept it. This is going to continue until every browser supports CSS2, and preferably CSS3. It’s looking like IE7 is going to be as stuborn as all it’s predecessors, so we’re looking at several years. It’s made me rethink that way that I approach a site design. From now on, it really is “content first”. Of course, I’ve always claimed that I do Content First design, but actually I do a content design based on the layout I already have in my head. Not any more. I’m going to write my next site so that it’s navigable in Lynx, and then I’ll make it pretty.