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How Do You Test Your Web Pages?
Pieroxy asks: "As a web developer, both professionally and personally, I try to always make sure what I write works in every browser at my disposal. When the choice came for me to choose a platform for my PC, I went the Windows route, because I cannot afford not to test IE on all those websites/applications. But now I am facing a problem with all browsers that don't have a native Windows port, such as IE5/Mac, Safari/Konqueror. kde-cygwin helped very little because the version of Konqueror shipped doesn't display most JPEG, making any testing worthless. IE5 for Mac should die soon, but is still widely used as being the default browser for so long. How do you test your web pages? Have you noticed discrepancies on how a specific engine (Gecko, Opera, KHTML) renders content on different Platforms? Do I need a Mac and a Linux machine to make sure it is working on these platforms?"
This really depends on the type of page I'm working on. If it's a personal page, I make sure it works with Mozilla and IEWin, because those are the two browsers I have available.
If I'm working on a business project, I let the boss spec the work. If it's required to work under Safari and IEMac, then they have to provide a Mac for me to develop with, not just have somebody else test it.
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
If you have a significant other (I'm married, so I do), sell them on getting a Mac. I bought an iBook for my wife, so I can test on my laptop (w2k), her Mac, and Linux by booting from my handy Knoppix CD.
That covers the base pretty well.
Of coures, it's always wise to generally try to avoid dicey display tricks that you know will probably give you problems... or if you absolutely *must* have that stock ticker, don't code it yourself -- find one whose creator is doing the testing for you.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
I have a PowerBook that I do my web development on. I then use Virtual PC to test the windows IE stuff. I have found that the Mozilla rendering engine on windows/mac/linux is pretty much the same, i.e. testing on one is good enough for all (granted I try and stick with writing things once and having it work everywhere so its the safer (X)HTML/CSS).
Actually. You can get a program called PearPc which allows you to emulate a mac. It's was in constant developement before one of it's programmers got hit by a train.
I don't think you can run OSX on x86 using any emulator/vm yet
:(
PearPC
If you do a little search, someone (on OSNews.com I think) managed to install OS X...
It's not perfect (yet), but it's better than nothing!
On a side note: checking their webpage, one of the Dev died of an Accident on July 2.
23 Years old. I guess only the good die young
I live in Soviet Canuckistan you insensitive clod!
You will probably never see this as the standards folks will mod me into oblivion, but here goes: if you use the time-tested combination of good old ugly tables and single pixel gifs, your site will look good in almost every browser imaginable. A quick test in Firefox and the latest IE should be all you need to do.
:-)
One exception is to use CSS for the font formatting stuff.
Standards are a great concept, but with web design you need to deal with harsh reality: browsers suck. Look at the source code at the front page of google.com or yahoo.com if you want to see what the big boys are doing.
Wait until Firefox has 95% of the market, then move to standards
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"And stop using dreamweaver."
I heartily agree. Dreamweaver may be the best WYSIWYG tool for old-fashioned table layouts, but it's useless when it comes to XHTML, CSS, and general web standards.
Designing your first layout with XHTML and CSS is a bit of a challenge, but it gets easy after that. I've discovered it's now easier to use a text editor than Dreamweaver; my code is lean and simple, and much easier for the developers I work with to plug their server-side code into.
Dreamweaver's time has come and gone. It's a useless tool until Macromedia chooses to turn it into an XHTML editor. Who knows when that'll be.