Will a design in IE look the same in most browsers?

[Rightz]

Hi,

If I'm designing a relatively simple site - html, a bit of js, php and css will it look ok in the other browsers?

I read a lot about ppl designing sites in FF that don't work in IE. But not so much the other way round.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

[hakre]

it's just the exact same thing just from a different side. if you design only in IE, you can have the same mess in FF then the other way round.

a year or so ago i proposed to use opera for designing instead, but that was version 6.5 ;)

today i'm just doing straight standards and do not care so much about IE any longer since most of the stuff does work today (if you keep it simple).

[Robin_reala]

Ideally you should be designing to the standards.

Hahahaha! Of course, no-one does, they design to implementations. So the best course of action is to pick the implementation that conforms the closest to the standards. Judging on who you speak to that's either Firefox, Opera, of Safari. Personally, I design with Firefox but for something simple you're probably good with any of them. Once it's working in that you can then debug in IE (it's a lot easier to fix IE bugs than to hack in Fx/O/S support as the IE bugs are well documented).

[doodlebee]

What Robin said.

I design using Firefox (my preference), and usually the design looks the same in everything I have to check it in (PC: Netscape 7, Firefox, Opers 7, Opera 8; Mac Safri 2, Firefox and amazingly, more often than not, IE5.) I then use conditional comments to "fix" IE issues.

It's sooooooo much easier to do it that way than to code for IE and try to "break" all the other browsers.

[MatthewHSE]

Ditto Robin_reala and Doodlebee. Way back when, years ago, I used to code "for" IE. Then I found out there were other browsers and realized my pages looked like a mess in them. I spent months banging my head against the same walls until I finally figured out it's so much easier to code "for" Firefox first, then tweak for IE.

The reason is that Firefox requires you to write pretty clean code, whereas IE will render any spaghetti code pretty much the way you intended. So fixing a page for Firefox that renders fine in IE can be a fairly big headache. On the other hand, a cleanly-designed page that uses valid HTML and CSS will normally only require slight modifications to look okay in IE (such as extra containing div's, etc.) So it's really very natural, once you think about it.

[tedster]

Another major advantage in coding to standards (and being sure that the document validates) is that you are giving spiders something you know they can deal with.

You can think of a spider as a kind of browser, but because it isn't rendering the html document on a screen, it also doesn't do the same kind of error recovery that a browser will do. In fact, we can't know what kind of error recovery any spider will have built in -- so for best results, try not to have any errors!

[fhirzall]

I put my site up in firefox and IE at the same time while i'm coding it, and just preview in both while testing it out and make changes as I go.

Also follow standards ofcourse : )

[truezeta]

I would recommend having the major browsers installed on your computer and checking your work in each browser as you design. I generally check my pages in IE, Opera, FireFox, Mozilla & Netscape, just to be on the safe side. I originally designed for IE and was horrified when I saw my website in other browsers.

[Rightz]

Thanks for the advice guys. I did use opera a few years ago but think I may try FF this time.

Cheers :)