Finally after a very long wait we are seeing web designers take the leap from supporting 600px width designs, to a much improved width of as much as 900px. This transition has been a long time comming, however finally we find ourselves in a new age of design enlightenment, and its about time too! To celebrate this, I have put together some great examples of websites which are leading the design revolution.

svenigson

svenigson

kompakt

kompakt

websiteburo

websiteburo

tnvacation

tnvacation

And that concludes just a small proportion of the many websites followiing this brave new trend

This is an Idea that I have heard bouncing around the web for a while now. I read a very insightful article on hacification which strengthened the argument considerably.

Good Reasoning

One of the best reasons for charging extra is to enable the client to recognize the time and effort that goes into fully browser complaint websites, it takes blood sweat and tears go get compatibility just right. So charging for this as an extra service is not entirely unreasonable, after all this comes separate to the time spent designing and developing a websites look and functionality.

The truth is there has never been a de jure standard for browsing the web, which in my own opinion is one the webs greatest downfalls. Instead there is too much choice on how to navigate your way through. This has lead to a grey area when talking about web design. The assumption that a website is a website and should be viewable through any means is a fallacy, but no one has ever acknowledged this properly. The W3C have introduced standards and done a lot of very good work, but it means nothing when designers are still expected to cater for decrepit platforms such as IE6 & 7, after all lets face it Microsoft just don’t get web, They should stick to what they know, which is desktop applications. By its very means Windows messenger, and Windows Hotmail, is a complete cop out, when Im looking at my emails on my OSX im not opening my messages with a different operating system, but anyway that’s besides the point.

Problems with the Plan

As with any great suggestion there are flaws. The main concern I have is how well the argument stands up in the real world. Consider that you were sold a car, but told you could only drive it on motorways, as the wheels may fall off if you drove it on any other roads. You wouldnt stand for it, so is it acceptable in web? This is something I have thought about an awful lot, but something Im still not sure I could actually do. Perhaps it depends on the client and their requirements, the scale of the project also make a great impact. I would be interested to know what others thoughts are on this topic!?

CSS Hacks have become something of an expectation in web design, with the mutitude of browsers your audience may choose to view your site through its important that your website looks its best whatever the platform. The statistics for browser usage portray 72% of the market is taken by ever faithful Internet Explorer users, followed by Firefox with 19% and Safari in 3rd place with 6%

Within these browsers you then need to contend with version control, in which you may see one version behave wildly different to its predicessor, no where is this more apprent than in IE6 - IE7. With all these considerations in mind, why not make life a little easier for yourself and try using the following CSS at the top of your stylesheet.

html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
b, u, i, center,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0;
outline: 0;
font-size: 100%;
vertical-align: baseline;
background: transparent;
}
body {
line-height: 1;
}
ol, ul {
list-style: none;
}
blockquote, q {
quotes: none;
}

:focus {
outline: 0;
}

ins {
text-decoration: none;
}
del {
text-decoration: line-through;
}

table {
border-collapse: collapse;
border-spacing: 0;
}

What we are doing here is declaring some master styles which will overwitre any browser specific ones, take for example IE’s broken box model, this no longer becomes an issue meaning that you save yourself a lot of time, writting exemptions on id’s and classes. which means you can spend longer thinking abut how to make the site look great, and less time on how it will format in other browsers. Its as simple as that!