i love the way that my site looks on my mac but i have had complaints about how it views on PC's .. so i went and viewed it myself and it looks bad things are different sizes and the Nav is entirely white with black type... is this normal? i viewed other people sites on index and the same thing was happening,,, is this something normal for index users?
Not normal. It depends upon how you customized things...for instance...did you make changes to your ie.css file as wel? Things, generally speaking, don't look as good on PC's because they don't handle the fonts as well...and Internet Explorer is rubbish as a browser but we're stuck with it.
Bad is relative...PC users are used to seeing the web that way...we are spoiled on Mac's. Many PC people don't even know what they are missing...
no all caps please
real rubbish! i just found the same issue and somehow i'm trying to contour it with a lot of sweat and pain over my ultra comfortable computer chair.
i find this tool helpful http://browsershots.org/ that allows you to watch rendered views in other platforms.
still, it ain't enough. we should test it real time. it does not show how animations would work. for example, the collapsible menu, on IE7, works differently from FF3. and you really need to test it on other computers.
does anyone know other useful tools to preview these issues that i mentioned?!?
If you have an intel mac, your can create a virtual box using Sun's free soft. This basically let you install a virtual "Windows machine" on your mac. Just get an old windows 95 from a PC friend (you do not need any fancy, memory hungry vista from testing purpose) and install multiple IE (do not install IE7 first, you won't be able to install 6... install 6 and update to 7 if needed... you can always revert the upgrade to test IE6), FF, Opera and all to run tests on all those if you are serious about cross-platform compatibility. You can also use bootcamp, but as far as I'm concerned, I just want to be able to quick test my CSS, so a virtual machine is way faster than having to reboot.
Browsershots can be usefull, but it is slow, so I use it to test only after I've done a local battery of tests and then check the odd browsers...
Like Iwakami mentions, a test on a real machine is the best thing. If you want to get serious about your thing, buying a cheap PC/a mac mini for PC users... could also be worth it. (I'd like to have a try on those EEE PC by Asus to see if it can be a serious test platform)
Like Vaska said, IE is far from being standard compliant... But I would say that is possible to do great web design that will look good in IE and all the other browsers. And use the extra things you can get from standard compliant browsers to push things up a notch. This will hopefully make hte IE users change to other browsers to get that extra thing you've done, while still offering a decent experience to IE users (which often have no idea of what browser they are using, for good or bad).
Personally, I think that, from my experience, Indexhibit does gracefully degrade with IE. So the the issues with sites looking different on Mac vs PC are the sole responsibility of the designer.
Sorry for the long post ;)
you really are a sweet helper.
thank you antoine ;D
Silly question?
From Vaska, "Not normal. It depends upon how you customized things...for instance...did you make changes to your ie.css file as well?"
So, do you just simply copy and paste the same style.css styles to the same ie.css styles? Ie, #menu to #menu?
The point of the ie.css is to add extra CSS that is only used when the browser is IE6. So all browsers (including IE) will be served style.css. Then, IE will be served ie.css. The order is also important since IE will gladly overwrite previously set CSS without even considering if the previous CSS is higher or lower in the hierarchy (this is the cascading part of CSS that IE doesn't seem to bother respecting, especialy with IE6 which is still fairly used).
So what does that mean? It means that you should do all of your CSS work in style.css, check with Firefox, Safari and possibly Opera (all available on all platform) then check if it is all fine in IE. If not, try to correct your style.css for easily solved problems and if all fails, add what's needed to correct only IE (often padding problem, width problems and positioning problems). Be sure you're happy with your CSS in all but IE before doing the final tweaking.
I know this sounds painful and annoying, but I would compare it to doing a good kerning job vs a sloppy one when you think about printed design... the lasts bit always takes much more time than anticipated, but with experience, you'll learn to see and tweak your CSS while writing it.
Hope that helps.
I also had trouble showing my site to people with PCs.
The jpg image in the pre-nav doesn't show
and the exhibits hide behind the index
(probably padding problem).
I am not sure how to "correct" the style.css,
I am kinda teaching myself css and have really
basic knowledge of it. If somebody thinks
there are basic ways for correcting these issues
and wants to share them I would be most grateful.
Thanks a lot!
www.zackpaul.com
www.forestowl.net
I've been working on my site, and have a basic layout done, which looks and works fine on Safari on my Mac, but I just took a look on my buddy's PC with Vista and IE, and my logo in the menu bar that links back to the homepage has a big ol' blue hyperlink border on it. How do I get rid of that? Is there a simple bit of html I can put in to get rid?
This thread has been closed, thank you.