“I’d love a proportional-width relative-positioning design for my weblog, but I’m too afraid of cross-browser compatability issues. I don’t want to spend more than a weekend figuring out how to get two columns to work in three browsers.” –
I have to agree with Dan’s sentiment here. It’s a bear to get relative positioning to work. I’ve got a two-column layout on my main site and a three-column layout here. I know that things look great at 1024×768 on IE6/PC, but I’m not so sure about other browser/OS configurations. My pages should be CSS and (x)HTML compliant, but does that really mean they render nicely? I doubt it. I’d love to please everyone, but I just don’t know if it’s possible without spending hours (days?) making hacks for every browser/OS combination out there. My stats tell me that almost all my visitors are using IE5 or better on a PC. Is it really worth the effort to try to be Netscape / Mac-friendly? I’d like to know. Are any of my visitors using Macs or Netscape? How do my pages look to you?
Blessed are the Mac users. Dont ignore them.
On MozillaRC1/Mac OS X this page looks loverly, and as you’d expect based on MSIE6/Windows.
On MSIE5.1.4/Mac OS X it is certainly acceptable, but the white space between columns is larger than I’m sure you’d want, but it’s not BAD at all, just not as slick.
Opera5.0.4/Mac OS X basically shows it as Mozilla does, though it isn’t QUITE as snazzy, for reasons I can’t determine.
OmniWeb has horrible standards support, and is liked in the Mac community cause it renders text pretty. Silly me, I prefer pages that work. I’ll not waste the time to start it, as it should be banned from the web for all time.
All in all, you’re good from the Mac side, which we all appreciate. Of course, in my opinion, do not code for Mac, or Win, or MSIE, or Gecko, or older Netscape, or Konqueror. Code for Web Standards. See several articles on http://www.alistapart.com about coding to web standards.
i’m using IE 5.1.4 with OS X (10.1.4) and the layout here is nice and clean. i too use a 3 column layout using css and no tables, but do find that it renders better on my mac than a pc. as it should be 😉
looks great in ie 5.2/mac os x!