Posted on Tuesday 16th of January 2007 at 05:42 in Web Development

Welcome to Developers Anonymous

"Hello" I said, "My name is Steve and I've been developing for a few years". "Hi Steve!" replied the group. "3 years ago, I said goodbye to Internet Explorer and I've never looked back" I continued and was met with thunderous applause. "I still use it occasionally, but I've got it under control and with the help of the group I've become fully reliant on Opera and Firefox".

Unfortunately this daydream of developers anonymous wasn't real, but more my brain escaping the harsh reality of IE6 failing to comprehend the notion that PADDING shouldn't add WIDTH to a div.

This got me thinking
Maybe there should be trained professionals on hand to take a stressed out developer onto the fainting couch and help them work through their issues, because the more time you spend around developers, the more you have to worry for their sanity.

I'm a developer and sometimes the very fibers holding my questionable sanity together are tested by erratic and inconsistent rendering. Let's not beat around the bush... Raise your hand IE, take the blame for all you've done.

Too many browsers
In the commercial web development environment you need to cater for more browsers than you want to, fact. At any one time you're looking at:
Firefox / IE 6 / IE7 / Opera / Safari / Camino / IE5.5?

Which is a lot, frankly. Even if you're doing personal development - getting the same site working on the big Windows 4 - Opera, Firefox, IE6 and IE7 can be an absolute mother sometimes.

Developers Anonymous - IE can't hurt you anymore

Then came the resolutions
What do you design to? Seopher.com is designed for a minimum of 1024x768 but commercially you're most likely still focusing on 800x600 - which is around the size of your fingernail on the 1280x1024 native resolution of a LCD screen. BUT what happens when you design for 800x600 and the customer is using a 24" widescreen Dell? Were you able to take that into consideration on your laptop? Probably not.

It hurts
Watching developers pull their hair out in frustration and then spend several minutes Google-ing for "I HATE IE" is painful and unnecessary, all we need is company funded trips to see trained professionals who understand our woes.

Developers Anonymous
We need a place where we can stand up, introduce ourselves and share the pain of cross browser development with our peers. Inconsistent CSS rending is every bit as destructive as alcoholism and it's about time that someone took notice and did something about it.

So please, let me be the first to welcome you to developers anonymous, leave comments below and share your pain with your peers

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Showing most recent 5 of 5 comments

Now was that a 64 bit platform problem processing my code or is there something more to it?

by J. on Wednesday 6th of February 2008 at 08:50

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by J. on Wednesday 6th of February 2008 at 08:48

Hi my name is Paul, i’ve been off IE for a good 3 years now. In fact I haven’t even bothered upgrading to IE7!

I’ve been web deving for a handful of months now and when I first started my sites were such a mess on IE as I was working for Firefox (my native). I found that IE needs to be spoon fed. It needs to know everything and you can’t let it assume anything!!

Was a headache but now things are clearer. Still an immense pain tho!

by Black Dragon on Tuesday 16th of January 2007 at 06:31

My name is Harvey and I’ve been off IE for 7 months now. It was an abusive relationship and I’m glad to be out of it now.

I’ve found Firefox and I’m looking forward to just moving on with my life.

by Harpo on Tuesday 16th of January 2007 at 06:12

Hi my name is Oli Warner and I’ve been developing sites, pages and content on the internet for about eight years. Seriously (with standards involved) for about four of those.

I’ve long since given up on IE5.5. This "browser" was never a decent option and only overtook netscape because it was installed by default.

I am further addled by the candle glowing in my very soul that tells me validation is the way forward. I feel wrong, to an extent bordering a psychosomatic illness, if I make something that only works because it hacked its way around the browser.

You need to understand: I was there, Gandalf. I was there three thousand years ago. I was there the day the strength of the Internet failed and browsers split their paths using platform-specific code. I remember the years of many, many websites "requiring" one browser or the other. The only other option was to make two versions. I was there...

I cope though and I do take solace knowing I’ve accomplished something without going back to those dark times. The future is with standardisation, not conditional rules.

Ideally somebody will convince Microsoft to dump their renderer and replace it with Gecko but until then, I will battle on.

by Oli on Tuesday 16th of January 2007 at 06:03