HTML and browsers

Occasionally i have to design webpages. Well, no doubt there are people around here who do this a whole lot better than i do. After all, I am a generalist, not a specialist. I design a webpage once a year, or once a month, not twenty a day.

For this reason I like to keep things simple. Of course that is 100% in line with the KISS=Keep It Stupidly Simple principle. But it is also highly practical. After all, every application grows until its complexity has made it unattainable. The longer you keep things simple, the longer the application can be kept running.

Keeping html pages simple to me is a matter of several aspects. One aspect is that pure html is easier to maintain than lengthy pages with hundreds of lines of javascript. Not only are long javascript codes more likely to contains bugs, they also tend to differ between various browsers and they als take longer to load.

I also tend to use FireFox as my primary browser. The web developer plugin detects a large number of errors before i spot them myselves. The debugging facilities of this plugin are fantastic, much better than anything I have seen for IE. The drawback is that some pages at the end do not work in IE as expected, so occasinally i have to break down my pagge and see where things go wrong.

Because I design webpages so rarely, I have to look up exact statements very often. I love w3schools.com as a reference. Easy to understand, well designed, and their examples actually work.