The Art of Exploding Gracefully

Modern web design is largely a house of cards. It is a series of hacks piled on top of one another to achieve an intended design or function. The limitations and inconsistencies of browsers are a huge part of this problem. The second part of the problem is lack of consistent adoption of tools that are secondary to HTML programming such as cookies, JavaScript, CSS, Flash, and Active X controls.

While using these tools works for the majority of visitors, they can’t be relied on exclusively. Websites need to have a plan B. This means taking the time to incorporate backups when the mainstream techniques fail. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. The “mainstream” techniques are elegant, or just plain sexy. The alternatives are messy, kludgy and generally not fun to build or use. But if you don’t have a backup plan, your website explodes and is completely dead to the users that don’t meet your exact specifications. Consciences developers don’t exclude large audiences just because they use a different browser or plug-in. They address minority audiences by providing alternative tools. Or better yet, they abandon the proprietary tools and create new standardized tools that work for larger portions of the web world.

A client recently came to us with a piece of software in hand, very excited about what we could accomplish with it. The problem was that it only worked in Internet Explorer… and only on PCs. You just can’t do that. Netscape may be dead but the “browser cold-war” is in full swing. FireFox is now used by more than a third of all web users. A few years ago, Firefox was barely a blip on the radar. Now it’s mainstream and there’s no going back to an IE-only world.

Now Macs are a different story. The latest W3 Schools stats put Mac usage at less than 4% of the surfing population… regardless of whether their using Opera, Safari, IE or Firefox. While you cna't ignore the non-mainstream world, you also can't cater to the lowest common denominator. I know this won't make me popular (especially among creatives) but the simple truth is that this splintered sub-faction of the internet world really doesn’t matter from a practical standpoint. Yes, it’s important to make sure sites work on Macintosh platforms but it isn’t worth spending an inordinate amount of time making sure everything renders out to the exact pixel. Until Mac adoption becomes more widespread, a certain degree of "exploding" can bee seen as an acceptable loss… as long as it explodes gracefully.