Down to the finishing touches for my first website (hopefully). Is it possible to design a site that looks perfect in Firefox & Safari but will also display properly in Internet Explorer?
I don’t have any problems with my site in Firefox but Explorer has some annoying line breaks or extra leading in the paragraphs that will throw things off. Am I hoping for too much? I’ve read and heard that IE is not the best browser but since so many people use it I want to eliminate as many problems as possible and still have it work in the other browsers.
Windows in general has a different idea of what constitutes typography than the rest of the world. So it’s no surprise that IE picks up some of its poor habits.
But if you are expecting lines to break in a certain way, or particularly if you have used “soft breaks” to set your own line breaks to improve the “rag” of a paragraph, then you’re going to be disappointed in any browser, as your visitors can upset your careful layout merely by raising their font size in the browser.
One of the first lessons of Web design is to let go, to let the browser do what it’s going to do. But don’t give up! Design defensively, allow elements room to grow, design your layout to accept these user-driven or browser/platform-driven differences with grace.
Back to IE: one of the things you can do to improve (but not correct entirely) the layout of HTML text is to explicitly set your leading (in DTP/Freeway terms) or line-height (in CSS terms) to a pixel dimension, and set your text to a pleasing percentage of that dimension, also in pixels. This will never overcome Windows’ charming insistence that the past thousand years never happened, and typesetting conventions are “just a suggestion”, but it is a large step down the road toward making things a little easier to read for our less fortunate OS cousins.