March 8th, 2008

Compromise

My website doesn’t work on IE6. Some parts of the text just, disappear. Plus on IE7 some paragraphs render odd. The question is, am I negligent, self-sufficient, limited?

I can make it work

”Some people are pragmatists, taking things as they come and making the best of the choices available. Some people are idealists, standing for principle and refusing to compromise. And some people just act on any whim that enters their heads. I pragmatically turn my whims into principles” — Bill Watterson

Nowadays 80% of my work consists in slicing websites for other people. I believe I am good at what I do, as I am required to optimize all kinds of designs for all kinds of browsers. It would probably just take me 30 minutes or less to fix the problems on this website. I do not want to do it! I will not do it because I want to make a point! The point is that I am too tired of optimizing stuff that shouldn’t require that extra work in the first place. If it looks fine on Firefox and Safari, is readable in IE7, that’s it. I will not support crappy software released in 2001.

That is why I am using pixels and not em’s on this website. I usually use big type so it shouldn’t be a problem for most people. Still want to bump up the size? Use a modern browser.

It’s about progress

If I am not going to use all the palette of functions on my personal website will I use it for client work? Others have made this point. Jeff Croft on the latest incarnation of his site uses beautiful anti-aliased corners plus a subtle drop shadow, but only on Safari. Sure, on Firefox it has the round corners, but, by using Mozilla’s proprietary jaggy implementation. No useless containers and no little PNGs everywhere.

I love that he uses DIN for headers that falls back on Helvetica Neue and Arial. I always looked at sIFR as a hack, so for me it is the best solution.

Is this a manifesto or something?

No way! I don’t want to change anything; I don’t want you to change anything. I didn’t mess the IE6 version on purpose, it is just rendered that way. I will still optimize websites for my clients and make them look decent on poor browsers. Just making sure you know where I stand with this website.