CSS and it’s place in the world (wide web)
Being a big advocate of the whole CSS revolution and striving to build pages completely in CSS, I was intrigued to see a column on one of my favorite forums, CSS Drive, that featured a Q&A with the creator of CSS, Håkon Wium Lie. Now I know it isn’t exactly Star Jones talking, since that seems to be all you hear on the radio or tv anymore, but this is, to a techie, a rather exciting thing.
Reading through this Q&A session, I stumbled across some interesting points. However, the most relative to recent happenings…and posts…was the question asking Håkon Wium Lie, if he could force Microsoft to do one thing, what would that one thing be? His response was to force Microsoft to create a browser that is compatible with 1 website, and only 1: Acid2. Of course, I was intruiged to visit this site, thinking it was going to be just all-out craziness, something that would force IE to explode. To my surprise, it is a very very simple layout; saying this not to discredit the work that went into creating it, more so to prove that it should be something that IE should already be able to handle. IE 7 (beta 3) handles it seemingly just fine, mirroring Firefox’s take on the page.
As web developers, we are trained to believe that Firefox is one of the superior browsers. Which in all honesty, I view it as #1 because it can handle the most beating that I can give it when coming up with complex designs, with the least amount of whining. Everyone is entitled to their opinions and after all, however, statistics show that IE6 is still the most widely used browser, coming in with a 58.2% usage rate at the end of June 2006 (according to WC3schools.com). Proving I have to be nice (enough) to the other browsers as well.
So…taking in all of that, the first link that catches my eye on the homepage of Acid2 is the Acid Browser test. At the time, using Firefox, I decided it would be interesting to see if it really is all the hype that it’s made out to be. I clicked the link and it asks me to take the test with link #1 and then compare it to the ideal rendering with link #2. Oooh! It’s almost like a game — see what you can find different in these 2 pictures! 
Well, let me tell you, it wasn’t hard to do at all. The actual output was horrendous. The ideal rendering is a silly looking smiley-face. What I got in Firefox looked nothing near a smiley-face except it kind of made a circle. Yikes!
I then decided that I had to, of course, test it out in IE7 (beta 3), since we all know it’s supposed to stand up and possibly be better than Firefox (some have claimed). Oh man! They are in for a surprise. This rendering was even worse than the Firefox rendering. This one looks more like a smiley-face that got run over by a semi-truck…or maybe one of Lance Armstrong’s buddies in the Tour de France.
One of the questions preceeding this one about forcing Microsoft, was asking Håkon Wium Lie if he believed the WC3 to be too slow at adapting new web standards (such as CSS3). His response was that he didn’t believe it was the WC3 rather the browsers we have available to us today. I think the above “test” was a great way to prove nothing less in that statement. I know that next time I create a site for one of our clients at Effect Web Media the results will rest in the back of my mind.
