It’s one of “those” weekends… promised deadlines spilling work comprehensively into the weekend. Most of today taken up with the task of cross browser testing on some pretty complicated CSS layouts.

I’ve been working with CSS layout for years now and have to say that the most recent incarnations of the major browsers are pretty much singing from the same song sheet. Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safarri and IE7 are similar enough that I can work in one of the browsers and then simply apply tweaks and amends where necessary to offer the best compromise across the lot. Also, over the years, I’ve built up a knowledge of what  layout strategies to use that will work well universally. It’s really less of a science and more of an Art form. This was the stage I had reached on Friday. However, it’s always important to keep one eye  out for the user who hasn’t upgraded to the latest browser versions. Particularly important in education and the public sector where the lag between release of a browser upgrade and the roll out across a network can often be greater than one increment out of step.

So today, I have been re-jigging the templates for use in IE6. I’m pretty much there, but it did require some general tweaks; a special stylesheet to be developed and, as ever, much use of Ctrl-Refresh across a couple of computers. It is nice to know that the hard days of CSS hacking are generally behind us. IE6 is the only remnant really with any particular foibles. And, with the ability to implement CSS  fixes using Internet Explorer conditional commenting, it’s not hard to tweak.

Looking at the analytics data across a whole host of sites that I manage, there are developing trends in the capabilities of the computer accessing the sites. Recently, we’ve moved to a base resolution for designs at 1024 x 768. The old base of 800 x 600 is overly restrictive and more and more unnecessary. Typically now, 800 x 600 access represents around 1% of total traffic. 30% are still at around 1024 x 768 and the rest, greater than this and often at widescreen resolutions. However, as an addendum to this, the use of mobile access is also on the up. These require a separate strategy to present information. However, good CSS site structure goes a long way to setting the foundations for this.

Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser, representing around 70% on a typical site. Of these IE browsers, IE7 makes up around 70% with IE6 most of the remaining 30%. You see a sprinkling of IE8 RC testers but the great news is it’s very rare indeed to see any access using IE5/IE5.5. Firefox takes up a significant portion of the 30% remaining after IE has it’s share, but safari use is on the rise as more people sign up to the Mac mentality.

Today’s templating took me into “z-index” territory for the first time. It’s something that I avoid as a rule but to achieve the design in this case it was necessary to overlay a DIV on top of another element. I was dreading looking at this element in IE6 but as it goes, it coped very well. Once I’d applied some box model fixes to widths, it was pretty much flawless. I work with some very talented designers and I let them free to design and hope to heck that they don’t put something down on paper that I can’t achieve. It’s not happened yet but I’m sure the day will come!

So, this leaves tomorrow to get the final template variants in place and then the hard slog of adding the content. I’ll have to arrange for a weekend another time I think.