Internet Explorer 7 and Future Proofing your Website
September 7th, 2006
The other day I wrote about preparing your website for Internet Explorer 7. My favorite example of how this can be done is Gemination, which appears differently in IE6 than it does in browsers which support more modern CSS syntax, such as Firefox and IE7. And it does so using standard CSS and a little knowledge about how the older and newer browsers should behave. And in the book covering the CSS Zen Garden, it predicted that IE7 would likely display Gemination the same as Firefox, and the prediction was correct.
I have always done whatever possible to try to predict what is next so that I can "future proof" my work. While working with websites for the past several years I have safely avoided fancy, non-standard markup in favor of markup that I knew would be around years later. Some of those web pages created using HTML 3.2 standards are now outdated by XHTML 1.0 Transitional, but have continued to work all this time. They may require quirks mode, but they work. And I did it by sticking to the recommended standards.
Here again you can see Gemination in action.
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Gemination in Firefox, IE7 and IE6 |
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What we will be able to do so much with the revamped versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox will be this year. And so many of our problems with HTML, CSS and Javascript are quickly going away.
That is why I am excited about Microsoft Expressions, a suite of applications to support web designers. You really have to see it in action. Microsoft has produced a series of videos to show what Expressions can do and how designers will work with it. The suite of products perfectly compliment Visual Studio. And the best part, they are all based on web standards with amazing support for CSS. These tools also provide smart features to assist designers with upgrading old websites with legacy markup to fresh new websites based on web standards.
Expressions should receive a warm welcome from groups like WaSP. And when we do see the release, we should be able to put Frontpage to rest once and for all.
March 3rd, 2008 at 11:32 pm
[...] I wrote Internet Explorer 7 and Future Proofing your Website which was a primer for preparing the imminent release of Internet Explorer 7. Now we will soon see [...]