A lament

I miss the days when I could ram everything into a series of nested tables, throw in some spacer GIFs, coerce some things into place with some cellpadding, col- and row-spans, and be done with it. I’d without thinking make all header & menu text out of GIFs, and virtually never, ever use the <hx> tags at all.

Now, it all seems so much more complicated, what with the different browsers. I’m damn good at making things look identical across IE/Mozilla/Opera on the PC, but then you throw a Mac into the equation, and I’m all hooped again. Suddenly my beautifully-sized fonts no longer fit where they did, the spacing is different, and my beautiful, in-line un-ordered lists just come out all goofy, often appearing in a column, rather than in a row. And so more testing is required.

Now, it is true that making edits is always much, much easier with the new way of doing things. It’s also true that I could quite legitimately build with tables & still validate. But that just seems so …90’s. So I toil and I trouble, and one day. hopefully this week, when I finally get a shiny new mac (just for testing, of course, because I’ve no use for one otherwise ($1500 for a testing box. Mac users can get a PC testing box for $400 — how fair is that?)), I’ll be able to quickly test and resolve these things until they’re just second nature. But until then, I don’t right much like this new-fangled way of doing things just now.

2 Replies to “A lament”

  1. Right on, bro’! Now that’s exactly how I feel every time I’m faced with web building these days, only for me, I get it right on the Mac and then the 98% population PC users write me and say “it’s broken” and I say “This used to be so easy.” ExACTLY.

  2. Right on, bro’! Now that’s exactly how I feel every time I’m faced with web building these days, only for me, I get it right on the Mac and then the 98% population PC users write me and say “it’s broken” and I say “This used to be so easy.” ExACTLY.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: