HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 1.3
Dan Cederholm
said it best with this cheeky
little site.
These are design philosophies that I have always held dear. They have not
always been easy to uphold, because you often meet clients who are “obsessed
with pixel perfection across all browsers” or some similar weird fetish. But they
are certainly becoming cool again, especially with all the CSS3 features to make
use of and lots of mobiles and other alternative browsing devices to make your
content work across. Oh, and IE6, 7, and 8 still have significant market share and
often need to be supported.
The wide variety of new devices you have to support these days (mobile phones,
tablets, TVs, etc.) actually makes things easier in terms of clients craving pixel per-
fection across all devices: It is impossible for sites to look and function the same
across all desktop and mobile platforms, and indeed it doesn't make sense (as aped
by dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com, seen in
Figure 1.3
).
It is all about context. What makes sense on a standard desktop computer might
well provide a bad user experience on a touchscreen mobile device or tablet.
The good news is that CSS3 is fairly easy to progressively enhance and gracefully
degrade, and otherwise get to work OK across old browsers. Most of the features,
if used in the right way, will degrade gracefully so that the base content will still
be accessible in nonsupporting browsers. Also, there are mechanisms that allow
you to build in support or provide alternative content if need be.
