Browsing across the miles

Terry sent me a weblog entry about having a web page render almost identically across today’s popular browsers, Mac and Win browser comparison. I have to admit I was fascinated by how alike the screenshots looked. I remember checking out my website on my cousin’s IE5 for Mac back in 2002, and was stunned that it rendered my site exactly as I’d intended it, which my Windows browsers did not (and I’d never seen it on a Mac before).

Anyway, it’s true, you don’t have to stick like mad to standards if you need your site to work across browsers — you see browser hacks everywhere. A fact of life for us Internets geeks, I reckon.

Here’s the catch. Nakfull Propaganda, the weblog in question, still uses tables, which makes cross-browser compatibility much, much easier. If I was still open to using tables to position my site elements, I’d really have nothing much to say. However, I am anal retentive, and I switched to table-less positioning a long time ago. I’m not looking back; I spent too much time learning CSS2 positioning. I’d be buggered (quite soundly with the world’s largest rubber band ball) if I went back to tables now.

• 25 Jan 2005