Website Testing: Conquering Cross-browser, Cross-platform Woes

As I was doing final cross-browser testing for a redesign of SKDesigns, my website design business, the design implementation was working quite well in nearly every mainstream browser for Windows, Mac, Linux, and even the Lynx text-only browser. Unfortunately, though, I found problems with three old or little used browsers, such as Internet Explorer 5.2 for Mac that destroyed the CSS-positioned layout. I toiled over how to best handle these browser bugs, especially since my upcoming Web design book—currently in production at my publisher—stresses the importance of usability, readability, and degrading gracefully for older browsers. Today’s post covers part of my decision-making journey and choices of approaches for dealing with these CSS bug-riddled old and little-used browsers.