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For many designers, particularly those weaned on the Macintosh (like us), promoting Microsoft products is an anathema. The company's anti-competitive business practices, now clearly exposed by the US DOJ, have killed many promising new technologies and warped a lot of independent thinking.
Against that backdrop it is difficult to acknowledge that Microsoft's IE (4 or 5) is clearly the better browser platform to accurately display our design efforts.
While we can dream of that shining day when standards rule the web, no one with both eyes open can claim that it's likely to happen any time soon. Designing Internet sites is a nightmare.
Combine the following ingredients in a frameset container: two or three tables, a paragraph of formatted text, a rollover image or two. Add a sprinkle of Flash and some scripting. Simmer over medium heat for 30 minutes and then plate in Navigator and Internet Explorer. In almost every case the IE page comes out the way you intended, while
the Navigator version is as attractive as one of Emeril's triple-bam! presentations.
Case in point, two years ago we sent numerous messages to Netscape asking them to implement a simple code routine to eliminate browser offsets. Imagine designing for print and not being able to put anything in the top left corner of the layout because the printer thought every design should have a margin. The first release of IE made the same
mistake, but Microsoft quickly produced a workaround with topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 so we could "zero out" our content. To date there's no response from Netscape and the problem persists. The time wasted on this single issue alone has soured us on Netscape.
HTML plods forward, as the W3C reinvents Postscript a step at a time. Vector-based Flash has flourished in no small part because it circumvents the layout and type-imaging restrictions of HTML. Adobe has proposed a Scaled Vector Graphics (SVG) standard that may change everything. And we wait for in vain for a consistent implementation of CSS
that will make it usable anywhere except single-browser Intranets.
Tables remain the foundation of most pages. IE supports background images in table cells, Netscape does not. IE makes intelligent assumptions about cell structure, Netscape requires content in every cell or that cell does not appear. Page background images are also shifted by Netscape offsets and so it's impossible to get browser agreement
on layouts that combine background and foreground elements in complex ways.
Our preoccupation with the user experience is far better served by Active-X controls than plugins. Accept or Deny; is a simple choice. One seamless installation later the IE user gets on with browsing the site. Meanwhile the Netscape user may still be trying to locate the appropriate plugin with the discontinuity of a browser restart ahead.
Thus far Netscape's open-source initiative has not addressed any of these page design issues and as recent surveys have shown, IE has taken the lead in browser usage for the first time. Netscape has squandered its enormous lead, and let Microsoft build a better browser. Netscape's ultimate survival, if it survives, will depend on the usefulness
of its software, for users and designers. At the moment, designers are poorly served by the Netscape product and that's why we recommend IE on all the sites we design.
- Michael Robertson
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