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[Amiduffer]

Someone posted a pie chart on the time breakdown of designing websites. Thought you might get a good chuckle out of it.

Warning, some swearing.

Pie Chart

[SamuraiCrow]

I haven't designed a website since the late '90s but I agree with the sentiments.

[Amiduffer]

I've been planning on setting up a basic website sometime soon, but, I'll try and make it as simple as possible. Is anyone around here forced to design sites with all the modern bells and whistles to keep up with all the newer media that keeps getting shoveled out?

[amiga_3k]

@Amiduffer:

I've done my own homepage and try to maintain it as well. The only one forcing me to use the newest bells and whistles would be me. So every few months I sit down and decide that 'I must do something with FLASH', then I download some progs (for MacOS 9) that should enable me to do so. I play with it for a few minutes, sometimes hours, and then decide to stick with good old JavaScript as it basically does what I want. The number of tricks you can pull using JavaScript still amazes me, even after a good 8 years of useage.

Why I even consider Flash? In theory it should deliver content that's showing-up the same on all platforms. It should give more freedom on manipulating the layout. But it's also painfully slow (the other day I saw a Flash re-make of Deluxe Pacman, the Amd Duron 750 running it had serious trouble keeping it up to speed) from time to time and rather difficult to get something useable.

[InTheSand]

Heh! Nice pie chart!!!!

A lot of web designers seem to totally ignore the KISS (keep it simple, stupid!) principle...

It's not too hard to make sites that degrade gracefully when run on non-CSS browsers, and to carry out more of the processing on the server side rather than the client side when technologies like AJAX aren't available...

But then again, if 99.9% of a web site's audience is running a current version of either Internet Explorer, Firefox or Opera, there's little incentive to make it work with anything else, or to test it under AWeb!

At least the days of the IE-only web sites are numbered, if not completely gone.

- Ali

[Waccoon]

I agree completely on the CSS vs tables thing. Why can't I put an image and a paragraph side-by-side without hard-coding a width? Why can't you use most CSS properties with tables? Is the W3C intentionally crippling tables to force people to do things "properly"?

The W3C compliance and Internet Explorer slices should be reversed, though. If you're making a badly-coded, overly flashy site, IE can be a problem, but if you're just trying to make simple resolution-independent layouts with some images, W3C rules are a MAJOR pain. To be quite honest, the only thing about IE that gives me problems is automatic margins. Other than that, all my designs work just fine.

I make gallery scripts, so HTML's insanely poor image and table support drives me nuts.

[amiga_3k]

The biggest problem IE is giving me is the fact that it still doesn't 'understand' transparent PNGs the way Netscape, Firefox and Opera do. Try stacking multiple transparent PNGs and it doesn't understand what's going on. I had programmed a photoalbum using JavaScript using a transparent PNG to add comments on top of the picture. Also I added a transparent controlpanel but for some reason they both appeared opaque in IE7 while on the other browsers it worked like I intended. Some investigation learned that stacking the images was causing the problem.

Another thing that's a bit of a pain is the fact that the CSS property of position absolute and fixed aren't quite working as one might expect when using IE.

The W3C standards are quite a good thing, the shame is that all the browser makers seem to interpret these standards differently.