The Net is Dead

Marco van Hylckama Vlieg on web technology, design, life and everything

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• At 09 January '07 - 06:02 Kyle Korleski wrote:

  

  Well, IE is just one of Microsoft’s biggest failures. It makes sense that it requires special coddling.

  
  

• At 17 January '07 - 08:18 Monkey majic wrote:

  

  I’m a man and i ware a bra!

  
  

• At 03 September '07 - 11:59 Indiana Jones wrote:

  

  Don’t you wish people would switch to Firefox already?

  
  

• At 03 September '07 - 22:08 Angel Rodriguez -leon wrote:

  

  hahahaha yhea thats true , special the part of IE and the one of CSS ,, hate em——-T_T——— cyaa

  
  

• At 04 September '07 - 03:19 axio wrote:

  “Time spent trying to get the layout to work only using CSS before giving up and using tables”
  
  At least the size of this pie diminishes over time. Now I know to do tables straight away if I want a fluid layout that works in all browsers :)

  
  

• At 04 September '07 - 06:40 x3n0s wrote:

  

  Sorry to be a purist, but tables should only be used for tabular data. If you can’t get a fluid layout with CSS, you need to go back and study CSS. It’s not that hard. Here’s a hint, use one long background image one your page’s container to display the the background color for all columns.
  
  Oh yeah, IE sucks!

  
  

• At 04 September '07 - 07:20 Noah wrote:

  

  When you learn how to use CSS and about all the browser quirks, it’s actually very easy to make just about anything work in IE without using Tables. Simply put, tables should not be used for layout at all. You actually end up causing more trouble for yourself when you use them for layout in any capacity.

  
  

• At 04 September '07 - 08:11 kL wrote:

  

  I suppose “going back to tables” and “bastard…explorer” parts could be made into one. If not IE, you could just use
  div {display:table-cell;}
  and have nifty fluid columns without abusing markup (remember kids – elements that look like tables aren’t bad for semantics)

  
  

• At 04 September '07 - 08:30 John Scibona wrote:

  

  This chart leaves out the time for delivering 3 or more original layouts, and accompanied revisions, to the customer before having them settle on the design you first presented to them. This of course immediately precedes the first cursing session.

  
  

• At 04 September '07 - 08:36 Morgan wrote:

  

  I love people thinking they’re ‘purists’ and then going through all the hacks and quirks it takes to get CSS working on most browsers together. A List Apart is dedicated to this pastime.
  
  I like using just the one hack, tables, and that they work. I’d be willing to bet the percentage of folks that open a page’s source and are offended by a table’s use for non-tabular data are roughly equal to the percentage of people not worth dealing with as customers.
  
  Plus it cuts about 75% out of the pie above, which is time I can use to sit around or watch TV.

  
  

• At 04 September '07 - 08:52 Ian wrote:

  

  It’s like you’ve been standing over my shoulder….

  
  

• At 04 September '07 - 09:05 Captain Context wrote:

  

  ... um, but I never resort to using tables. So, that time, for me is spent reading Reddit while web designing.

  
  

• At 04 September '07 - 09:16 x3n0s wrote:

  @ morgan,
  Using tables for layout is very hackish. Learn proper CSS and read up on list apart to see how things should really be done, and in no time, you’ll be spitting out pages so fast, you’ll have all the time in the world for watching TV.

  
  

• At 04 September '07 - 09:32 Sean wrote:

  

  Actually, I spend most of my time making it work in FireFuckingFox.

  
  

• At 04 September '07 - 09:34 Joe Levi wrote:

  

  The whole “time spent trying to lay it out using CSS before giving up and using tables really” dates this graph. CSS layouts are SO much easier to develop and maintain than are layouts made with tables… and I’ve done plenty of both…
  
  We need a new graph that introduces Safari, Alpha Transparent PNGs, and CSS hacks.
  
  :)
  
  – http://www.JoeLevi.com

  
  

• At 04 September '07 - 10:17 Firefox Lover wrote:

  

  Firefox is soooo much a great help for designers !

  
  

• At 04 September '07 - 11:18 mark wrote:

  Isn’t CSS mostly a MS invention.

  
  

• At 04 September '07 - 11:20 Philip wrote:

  

  The hardlined truth of the matter is that Firefox and Safari support all wc3 standars. They are very strict, and only render correctly written code. If you ake a page, and do not write it according to wc3 standards (as all designers should) it will not work in FF, or Safari. Internet Explorer has made us all lazy, because you can write some very messed up code, and it still work. Tip: Write using safari, then get it working in FF…. It will always work in IE.

  
  

• At 04 September '07 - 12:25 logical wrote:

  I never seem to have that much trouble getting high quality products to production. The best solution is to set realistic goals for the design, features, and layout. Another help is using a framework such as jQuery. Other than that, I love my work and even though it can be challenging at times, theres always a good solution.
  
  Tip: if you preceed a CSS attribute with _, it will apply to IE browsers only. That’s been a very clean and easy trick to solve any cross-browser problems.
  
  Example:
  
  // works in firefox
  padding:10px;
  
  // IE needs extra
  _padding:20px;

  
  

• At 04 September '07 - 12:45 Muppets wrote:

  

  If your design is simple then should have no problems, if you’re doing some seriously intricate work then the Firefox/IE compatability issues are a nightmare and dont even get me started on safari or Opera.

  
  

• At 04 September '07 - 12:49 Zombie Kid wrote:

  

  I like turtles

  
  

• At 05 September '07 - 01:10 Benjamin Smith wrote:

  

  > Internet Explorer has made us all lazy, because you can write some
  > very messed up code, and it still work.
  
  Whatever you’re smoking, I want some. It obviously works well!
  
  Stuff “just works” in Firefox. I’ve spent DAYS trying to get otherwise W3C compliant HTML to render AT ALL in IE. It might do better at making utter crap HTML render, but when you get into the complicated stuff, IE is a dog’s breakfast after being left out a few weeks. (ignore the flies!)

  
  

• At 05 September '07 - 01:26 Jeff wrote:

  

  Wow l love it.. great!!!

  
  

• At 05 September '07 - 01:37 Mars wrote:

  I like Santa Claus and fluffy things…

  
  

• At 05 September '07 - 01:53 Martin Saulis wrote:

  

  I understand this is a joke. but still. this is just lame. that graph is a joke.. right? isn’t it?
  
  in case it’s not a joke.. I pity you and your clients.

  
  

• At 05 September '07 - 01:58 Sanmar wrote:

  Sadly, this also equates to many other programming languages as well, the theory is all the same. The first time you ‘complete’ something, it isn’t completed until fifteen cursing sessions later, and a secret desire for the client to be hit by a bus after they change their mind twenty times and come back and agree to use the original idea that was laid out to them.

  
  

• At 05 September '07 - 02:09 Mina wrote:

  

  Maybe if there was more time spent “Learning how to develop properly” and not “Crying because I can’t get this to work in Internet Explorer”, there would be less of the yellow colour.
  
  Seriously, it’s not exactly difficult!

  
  

• At 05 September '07 - 05:23 Vince wrote:

  

  Jesus christ, this is f-ing gospel!

  
  

• At 05 September '07 - 08:15 l.m.orchard wrote:

  

  To all the people saying that MSIE is easy, or that the solution to keeping away from tables is just to learn CSS properly…
  
  You’ve obviously ever run into any obscure and resistant-to-fix browser bugs in the 11th hour of a project where you’re one table layout away from finally getting home for dinner – or getting a nap under your desk.
  
  Most of the time it’s not about “using CSS properly” or knowing the standard – it’s about knowing all the fiddly little hacks and parser tricks and one-off trivia specks that you may not have been lucky enough to have picked up at one point or another in your copious amounts of free time reading A List Apart. That’s not using CSS properly.
  
  When the cost analysis is finally getting something mostly bullet-proof and working using a table, versus getting made fun of by some web weenies – I’ll say f**k it I’m using a table. Most of the time I’m giving it the old college try for CSS because I thoroughly understand the benefits – but sometimes it just ain’t worth it.

  
  

• At 05 September '07 - 11:05 David Cramer wrote:

  

  You forgot the time spent finding the extra comma in JS which is causing Opera/IE to fail :)

  
  

• At 05 September '07 - 11:31 Tim Oram wrote:

  

  I don’t see why people are having so much trouble with div and CSS layouts. I have been doing them for years without too much trouble.
  
  The only major problem I have ever had with IE was the ‘Internet Explorer box model bug’ and usually I just leave a little extra room so that bug won’t throw the page off to much. And IE>=6 does not have this bug if you design the page with the correct doctype.
  
  As for fluid layouts they are very easy to do in CSS once you discover how. One thing that took me awhile to discover was using the margin-left and margin-right properties to make a static width navigation bar with a fluid width body.

  
  

• At 06 September '07 - 20:58 Seb wrote:

  

  After Firefox starts to get the hot thing to have (because of super cool plugins nobody’s thought of yet. Or the did, but they just haven’t gotten around to it … ) is that Microsoft will eventually open source Windows and IE, and make the OS free and functional.
  
  And I don’t know how open the source will be … that depends on whatever license they come up with, but people will contribute. And we’ll have one more free, open source OS to choose from.
  
  Just gotta wait till Microsoft realizes they can’t beat us … then they’ll join. (pretty cool looking at it from this less traditional side)

  
  

• At 06 September '07 - 21:03 Seb wrote:

  

  And Tim’s right. You can always use expressions in IE to get away with it.
  If you think about it it works out well. A lot of the times, they don’t interfere with the one’s firefox understands.
  
  I’m saying you can define {left:0; right:100px; width:expression(document.body.offsetWidth-100);} and it works on both, without hasle once you learn expressions.

  
  

• At 07 September '07 - 11:08 andrew wrote:

  

  I just spent 10hrs trying to figure out which elements to add “height:1%” to (and which not to) get my layouts working in IE. Oh yeah and a bunch of time trying to figure out why z-index just does not work in IE. That is not using CSS properly. And it wasn’t exactly easy, its a pain in the ass. and tables wouldn’t have fixed it. vomits on IE

  
  

• At 07 September '07 - 17:46 Michael wrote:

  Any hack is likely to break with new browser versions, as many developers probably realized when IE7 was released. Better to use syntactically valid tabular layout than to use syntactically incorrect markup and risk much larger problems than the mixing of presentation and content (like the page not displaying at all!)
  
  Of course, if you really know CSS, you don’t need to use hacks at all. There’s always a way to work around them. It’s only a matter of how much time you have to fiddle around looking for that way.

  
  

• At 09 September '07 - 12:47 Cide wrote:

  

  ahahahhahaha SO TRUEE! IExploded many times cuz IE can’t do jack squat

  
  

• At 11 September '07 - 06:33 Daniel Craig Jallits wrote:

  

  I tend to agree with this graphic, except for the bit about the CSS, no real problem there. I would suggest eliminating that and taking that percentage and create a new section for time wasted the newest spec or recommendation from the W3C.

  
  

• At 12 September '07 - 00:57 Fixme wrote:

  

  What you CSS purists seem to overlook is that it really shouldn’t take months of practice to make a trivial layout work in the first place. The simple fact of the 100’s of pages out there telling you how ‘easy’ it is to not use tables speaks volumes.
  
  There’s something basically dysfunctional about the whole CSS standard – it’s too hard for most people to do even simple things, and too convoluted to remain lucid once your site grows and modifications accumulate (Can you read another man’s stylesheets? I mean real stylesheets as opposed to simplified demos to show how ‘easy’ CSS is?).

  
  

• At 16 September '07 - 07:39 mark rushworth wrote:

  

  LOL... add in time spent explaining to client why theres white panels either side of an 780*420 design and more explaining why they cant interact with a static jpeg comp done in the first 5 hours of the project.

  
  

• At 18 September '07 - 13:13 AutumLight wrote:

  dont know why people need to code table in CSS when HTML is doing already a great job. After all CSS was intruduce to help HTML not take its place.
  
  Like the graph lol

  
  

• At 12 October '07 - 08:38 Dirk Jan Luiting wrote:

  

  show it to my boss!

  
  

• At 19 October '07 - 15:03 braindrain wrote:

  pity you =/

  
  

• At 23 November '07 - 04:30 Alvise Spano' wrote:

  

  I think that the problem is the conflict between desiring the death of IE and still continue spending entire nights to make things work for this crappy browser, “working for the enemy” and hiding the serious design flaws of IE behind tricks, hacks and workarounds.
  
  What about our social responsability as website developers? It would be great if some of the most famous web designer of the world promoted a sort of “web developing conscientious objection”, working to produce sites that looks well in web standard compliant browsers regardless the behaviour of the css code in other browsers.
  
  So we’ll come back to the era of “best viewed with…” banners but this time the sentence will not end with “internet explorer 800×600” but with “web-standard compliant browsers”.
  
  This will boost the users base of Firefox, and eventually will force IE to stop their crazy and senseless browser war based on standard forking.
  
  Maybe some associations like CPSR or EFF could promote some “etichal code” for web developing, including in the list of ethic behaviour the use of web standard regardless the market quota of non-standard compliant browsers.
  
  So when a customer complains with us because the website we developed doesn’t see well with the damn IE we could say “well, it is not our fault. We are respecting both international technical and ethical standard, so if you want to blame somebody for this problems please go to Redmond”.
  
  I don’t know if this is simply utopia or it could be a good solution to our professional nightmares that could push the web toward its standards.
  
  But personally I don’t like to complain for things that I don’t even try to change.

  
  

• At 25 December '07 - 20:08 Peter wrote:

  I think this graph just about sums it up.
  I also think that the table slice and swearing slice are much smaller for me. I know when to use tables and not worry about semantics. Semantics are not the goal, the goal is great user friendly web design. Most of the time tables do this just as well as divs, and this includes accessibility and portable devices if you know what you are doing. Divs should only be used when they work, if they don’t work they should not be used. It is as simple as that.
  
  Unlike some other people I am able to recognize that css itself is very raw at the current stage of its development, the browser support is insufficient AND THIS IS NOT MY PROBLEM. I will switch to all CSS no sooner than it becomes stable, this is just the responsible thing to do, to myself and to my clients who are paying me by the hour and are never easy to find.

  
  

• At 06 February '08 - 15:30 Morris wrote:

  I use tables because the ‘pure’ CSS alternatives for some use cases have to use multiple browser hacks to work… Who wants a fragile page that won’t work in some phone browsers and breaks with future browser versions?
  
  logical wrote:
  Tip: if you preceed a CSS attribute with _, it will apply to IE browsers only.
  // IE needs extra
  _padding:20px;
  
  I find the * hack that works in IE6 and IE7 useful. The _ hack doesn’t work in IE7 (maybe does in IE7 if you don’t have a doctype??? (and are not in CSS mode???)) e.g.
  *padding:20px;

  
  

• At 07 October '08 - 14:44 badandproud wrote:

  Not just me then? Why when web design is more boring than 10 years ago do we have all this moderating crap. CSS sucks as does javascript , and Java. I particularly hate Firefox as we had got used to only one browser to worry about IE; which is bad but at least I got to the pub more!

  
  

• At 08 January '09 - 11:28 Tom wrote:

  

  Actually, a couple of those slices should overlap a bit. You’ve “said” it yourself, but you didn’t notice it: “Time spent trying to get the bastard to work in Internet fucking Explorer” overlaps a lot with “Swearing”
  That’s when you do most (not all) the swearing and you begin to give baby Jesus middle names that your parents wouldn’t let you pronounce when you were young.

  
  

• At 26 January '09 - 14:00 Jeff wrote:

  This graph is classic and dead on. Those saying IE is not hard to develop for… Ever heard of the w3c? Look it up.
  
  No matter if you write rock-solid, standards-based XHTML and CSS, many times your page just WON’T look right in IE, while 6 other different browsers display precisely as intended. So the standards that make life easy to develop for Firefox and all other modern browsers?
  
  You have to circumvent them with hacks and nonsense CSS rules to appease the IE gods. If you’re not seeing these issues I’d be willing to be your design eye isn’t what mine is, because I see them every day of my life.
  
  Let’s pray IE 8 will be better, because a great deal of my stress and the stress of every other web developer I know, is dealing with IE’s crap.

  
  

• At 18 June '09 - 08:21 Jane wrote:

  

  Why bother with CSS hacks when you can just use conditional comments? If you make sure you target them to IE 7 or earlier then there’s no danger of them breaking IE 8.
  I think it’s worth putting in the effort to learn CSS properly because used correctly it’s much easier to maintain and change than tables are – you can just move the blocks of content around and add or delete them without having to worry about colspans and rowspans.
  I also find it a lot easier to spot my errors (like tags i forgot to close) in a CSS layout than in a table-based one.
  Firebug or the Web developer toolbar for firefox can really help you learn CSS by allowing you to edit the stylesheet in real time and see the effects of each rule as you type.

  
  

• At 19 August '09 - 09:24 fandy wrote:

  

  IE ohh IE…
  
  preview on opera “fine”, preview on firefox “great”, preview on IE “Broke”
  what wrong in my CSS..... /* I have no more time */
  
  time for presentation; think…. thinkkkk…
  
  “Hi guys, can you just using firefox or opera to presentation…”

  
  

• At 25 August '09 - 04:48 developer wrote:

  “Blaming IE” is haven for those crappy coders not finishing their job in time, lol! They know the true reason why they hate IE but never dare to confess.

  
  

• At 10 October '09 - 20:46 Leonidas wrote:

  

  I’ve noticed a striking correlation between the percentage of Web developers who attempt to defend the viability of M$ / Internet Explorer, and the percentage of Web developers who have never touched a boob (other than their mothers’). Sounds like it would make a cool graph…

  
  

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