Another chapter from the “arguments between myself and the other senior developer” series 😛
My position is that when doing web development, browser code should be written first and foremost to adhere to the W3C web standards, even though Internet Exploder has the greater market share (anywhere between 51% and 79% depending on who is doing the tracking). My reasoning is:
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The standards are locked in and all browser developers are moving towards at a minimum, 100% bug free support for all the set standards. Therefore code should be written and tested around Firefox/Chrome/Safari, which are much closer to proper standards support than IE8, then conditional tags should be used in IE to work around its bugs. This is particularly the case seeing as you can use conditional tags to work around IE bugs, but if you try to code in reverse, it’s much harder to write hacks to force Firefox/Safari/etc to display the coded-broken HTML/CSS correctly.
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You’re future-proofing your web applications if you design for standards seeing as all the browsers are aiming at the same place, standards-wise, which means you won’t be among the crowd that then has to repair their application every time a new browser version comes out that is closer to web standards, thus making some of your initial hacks now break the layout.
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Coding something broken to support the larger market share then “unbreaking” it for the smaller market share, if you have time, seems like a careless way of approaching a job and suggests that you think that 20% market share is insignificant, which I think is very far from the truth.
My co-developer argues:
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The different browser companies like to go off on their own tangents and don’t really care about the standards anyway, so trying to code for standards is a waste of time.
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Coding to support a minority ~20% market share is not worth the effort as long as the page roughly displays in those browsers in a way that is still usable.
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A browser is a browser is a browser. It’s just a viewport for rendering text and I shouldn’t be worrying so much about things looking exactly right.
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It’s a pain to have to develop in Firefox when he prefers IE8 anyway.
I am the one in charge and of course I can say “this is the way it goes”, but I hate just being a nazi and saying “my way or the highway”; I think it is better to have the others understand why we’re doing something a certain way so that we’re in agreement as we proceed and therefore the conventions we’re following get stuck to because the reason behind them is appreciated rather than begrudgingly followed.
Can I get some input into this argument?
Develop to W3C standards, and make it look good in IE. They are not mutually exclusive.