Who would have thought a decade on.

Browsers, bugs and all things IE

[simonuk]

Who would have thought a decade on us poor web designers still have to workaround or forward plan for browsers that just won't act nice with CSS.

When I first started dabbling with CSS "best viewed in #*$!" messages were commonplace, the animated gif with no real value were rampant and guestbooks / hit counters were rife. Geocities had brought web-editing to the masses and Alta Vista / Yahoo were the kings of the World.

IE6 being launched brought hope to CSS creators and with so many browsers and browser versions coming out I don't think anyone thought IE6 would maintain such a high user base for such a length of time.

In ten years CSS should have become easier and easier like many other tools. I can still create pages quickly using CSS but I have the knowledge to know the limitations and problems I'm likely to face with the PSD template I've just been handed.

I wouldn't like to be a new designer now having to learn so much knowledge (I'm not thinking of just CSS when I say this) from the get-go...

[swa66]

The good news for the new entries in this field is that IE6 usage is finally dropping.

The bad news is that the legacy IE7 is still out there in force, and IE8 might well prove to have a set of problems of it's own for the future (e.g. it lacks most of the CSS3 stuff the other browsers are adding at a fast pace now).
All that while IE6 isn't -for me anyway- yet at the point where I feel like ignoring it like I do with IE5.x .

Begin around on the world wide web since 1994, it often is easy to see things coming back full circle. It's called experience.