16 July 2002

Cross Platform Coding My Aunt Fanny

Girl geek rant.



I just love trying to get layouts to look the same on various browsers. What a fucking pain in the ass. Fix one thing for one browser and it breaks in another. Bah. Humbug. Putting aside every web designer's nightmare of Netscape4 (aka AOL fucked up a good thing quel suprise), I just love how the highly-touted-as-really-standards-complient Opera browser has problems with a simple "width" attribute. Netscape 6 has a nice little refresh bug that makes any images rollovers hiccup after F5ing. It's enough to make a girl fully embrace the dark side of MonopolySoft and code only for IE.

Yeah right. Who am I kidding? I personally hate pages that have the small print of "This page works best in X browser with a screen res of 30000 x 6 pixels during the waxing moon and by the way we hope you've downloaded 30 different plugins so you can have the full viewing exerience." Bollocks to that. Just because *I* have upgraded and downloaded and tweaked and made my computer play electronic twister doesn't mean that Giovanni Doe has the slightest idea of "patches" or "plug-ins" (and most likely thinks that they are one of them thair viruses that disolves your hard drive by causing a massive power surge, melting computer innards into a worthless pile of slag)

While I'm at it, I. Really. Hate. Flash. Can we say "overused"? While some bells and whistles are a good thing, all bells and whistles is noisy. I tend to think of it as (laugh all you want boys) accessorising. A bracelet here, some earrings, maybe a funky pair of shoes, and volià, you have a kiler outfit that turns heads in envy, admiration, and lust. But thirty bracelets, huge earrings, a scarf, a purse, clunky necklace, snakeskin belt, leopard print shoes, and 3 tons of makeup gives you an outfit that makes Phyllis Diller look like the epitome of elegance and taste. I don't deny that Flash can be a powerful tool, but only if used for the Good Side Of the Force. Of course you always have the problem of clients wanting "animation" and"can you make it blink?", but I try to sway them towards the "less is more" approach.

If that doesn't work I can always use big scary techincal terms to frighten them onto the straight and narrow of Keepin' It Simple Stupid design. :-D

*sigh* Back to work.

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