Pixel Perfect Web Design
Many people producing content for the web have come from the world of print design, and are wedded to the concept of "Pixel-Perfect" design, where a page looks EXACTLY the same in all browsers. Some even go to the extreme of blocking browsers that don't render the page "right". However, this approach is ultimately doomed to failure.
In the same way that Film is a dramatically different media from Theatre, the Web is not the same as Print. Quite apart from the obvious possibilities of HyperLinks, the web allows:
- Third party indexing. In the future, the Semantic Web will allow search engines the likes of which we can only dream about now.
- User text resizing, so that the visually impaired can read pages without needing a special "large print" version. Many print designers really hate this bit, and exploit a bug in Internet Explorer to lock the text size.
- Constant updates - a web page can be a "live" document in ways that print publications can only aspire to.
- The ability to read pages on a huge variety of hardware - PCs, Macs, Mobile Phones and Palmtops, for a start.
- The ability to be read in a non-visual way - aural browsers, and the kind of machine reading which will be central to the Semantic Web.
This variety of hardware and software means that there can be no guarantee of any part of the appearance of a page. You can't rely on things like colour, or even on the fact that the reader is going to see the page.
Therefore, the best hope is merely to ensure that pages are readable in as many circumstances as possible. By all means, include decent presentation if the platform supports it, but do so in a way that will degrade gracefully in (for instance) a text-only browser. Luckily, XHTML and CSS have been designed with this objective in mind.