Web Standards and Browser Compatibility

Beleive it or not, but I’ve actually been using the Uni holiday’s I’ve been enjoying constructively, trying to get alot of web design work done, or close to complete. That means alot of coding and alot of fighting with browser compatibility.

Alot of the work I’ve been doing has been using WordPress which is the blogging software that powers this blog, but I’ve also been using it as a robust content management system for two websites I’m currently working on one of which is the new St. Faiths Narrabeen site. WordPress has proved to be a very useful tool, with it powering about 25 pages on the St Faiths website, but we’ll have to see how it holds up when the site goes live with the possibility of it being used as an engine to provide a podcast feed as well.

Unfortunately, I’ve had to do alot of fighting between Safari on my mac and Firefox and IE on my PC to get the websites looking similar in all 3 browsers. Even worse, IE7 Beta 3 hasn’t had much done to it to improve its recognition of the W3C web standards, and has caused me to almost punch holes in the nearest wall at some stages. Another thing that is quite annoying is that the WordPress rich text editor (which allows you to not need any HTML knowledge when typing posts) doesn’t work in Safari, so it’s back to HTML coding for me, not that it’s a real problem.

I’m still also playing around with Drupal, and would love for anyone with experience with it to drop me a line because although I think it has some really good features, I’m having a bit of trouble getting used to it.

On another note, it’s my 19th birthday tomorrow, so if you’d like to find out what I’m doing, give me a call, email me, or skype me!