Designing With Web Standards, Second Edition

Chapter 12. Working with Browsers Part II: Box Models, Bugs, and Workarounds

“Create once, publish everywhere” is the Grail of standards-based design and development. We don’t learn proper XHTML authoring to win a gold star. We do it so that our sites will work in desktop browsers, text browsers, screen readers, and handheld devices—today, tomorrow, and 10 years from now. Likewise, we don’t use CSS exclusively for short-term rewards like reducing bandwidth to save on this month’s server costs. We do it primarily to ensure that our sites will look the same in Internet Explorer 14.0 as they do today and that unneeded presentational markup won’t impede user experience in non-CSS environments. To save breath and time, I have labeled this raison d’être ...