Funny Way to Run a Railway

Got into a conversation with a web design company today. They had asked permission to use one of my pictures on Flickr (which was nice of them) and mentioned the site they were building.

I had a quick look and the site was really swish. Well designed and with nice content. But I noticed that one of the pages did not render quite correctly with IE8, my current browser of choice. I’ve been quite happy with IE8, although it has to be said that sites don’t always look right with it. Perhaps this is due to it being more standard than they are, but I’m not sure. Anyhoo, I tried the page with Safari and it seemed to look OK so I pinged the company my findings.

They came back to me and said “Oh, that’s interesting. We don’t usually test our sites with IE8 or Safari.” I found this very surprising. I’m not sure if a shop would do very well if it has window display that was only visible to blondes, or put everything on a high shelf where only tall people could see it (although I’d be OK on both counts of course).

If I was running a web design company I’d make it my business to ensure that the site worked correctly with everything. Of course one day, in a distant utopian future, we might have some web standards that would mean browser compatibility was no longer an issue, but for now it is – and I would have thought that would be standard practice to worry about this kind of thing.