Accessibility Toolkit

Story: Support standards, not multiple browsers

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Excellent article. But the problem now becomes what to do about Internet Explorer. IE has, by far, the worst support of web standards of all major web browsers. And I don't just mean that they don't support everything everyone else supports, but that they also support some of the basic stuff incorrectly.

Even so, it is certainly easiest to design first according to standards and then make tweaks to make sure all of the major browsers are doing what you want. Web designers who do it this way unanimously develop a resentment toward Internet Explorer, to some degree. Typically, when you design a website according to standards, it works first go in Firefox, Opera, and usually Safari and Konqueror, and when using proper separation of content and presentation, it also works great in text browsers like lynx and ELinks, screen readers, and search engines. Typically, Internet Explorer is the only browser that has problems, and the problems are often serious. In order to work around them, designers are often forced to either use hacks (which are generally bad practice and can cause further incompatibility in the future) or eliminate some of the fancy styles and scripting that Internet Explorer doesn't support.

In most areas, the standards are easier to code to than Internet Explorer's methods, accessibility comes more naturally, and more can be done. The one major exception, in terms of power, is Internet Explorer's ActiveX, which no security-conscious user should have enabled anyway.

So there are still barriers when attempting to code to standards, and most of them come from the browser that is usually the most essential to support. If any other major browser was in IE's place, there would really be nothing to discuss, and Internet Explorer would simply be left in the dust.

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