Jun
23
CSS and Current Browser Usage
Filed Under Web Design | Comments Off
There are some interesting figures on current browser usage at W3Schools.com as of May, 2008:
IE7: 26.5%
IE6: 27.3%
IE5: 0.7% (not worth losing sleep over)
FF: 39.8%
That high a figure for Firefox surprises me, I thought it was somewhere between 15-20%. Of course, it may depend on the particular audience a given site has, but either way there’s enough of a spread between IE and FF to keep me from becoming a CSS purist and relying on a ton of hacks to make complicated layouts work cross-browser with just CSS positioning alone.
I’ve seen some brand name sites this past week with text dropped down below where the side navigation ends (including at the O’Reilly site, and a site with CSS tutorials, of all places). And I’m sure a 17″ monitor using 1024 resolution isn’t at all uncommon.
It’s definitely time to get rid of most font tags on pages and replace with CSS styling, but when pages have code bloated with classitis and divitis that rival the most profuse use of font tags, that makes a pretty poor case for replacing nice, lean tables to lay out pages.
I’m right now very conscious of this because I’m working on “cleaning up” a horrible mess on someone’s site that’s got (aside from the same off-topic , irrelevant titles and metas repeated throughout) a 24KB linked stylesheet, which is duplicated inline on some pages for a total of 24K to 48K of CSS - and *still* has had to have over 300 <font> tags and unused <span> tags removed from a good number of the pages - which all still used font tags.
The span and font tags have been stripped on pages that have been cleaned so far, and the stylesheet is now 1KB - and that includes comments so that the site is maintainable.
It’s a cleanup, not a redesign, so it’s a moot point, but the above still wouldn’t justify ditching tables on the whole site and going to pure CSS for positioning throughout.