Hacker News Reader

Comment by jackowayed | Hacker News Reader

True story: I know a guy who's so used to writing cross-browser CSS that he gets things the way he wants in FF, then checks it in IE and it's usually right or needs very slight tweaking, which he of course knows how to do.

He'd be a perfect candidate for the job if he weren't starting a company with me :) But I bet there are others out there like him.

View on HN

The best CSS/HTML developers should be like this — if you deal with fixing bugs in IE enough, you start writing code that prevents them in the first place while still looking awesome in standards-compliant browsers.

Happy to say that I'm one of those — the day I discovered I could do this, I felt like I leveled up.

That's pretty much how I am, even with Comet stuff now too, though JS in general is better across browsers.

But really, for basic page layout, the rules around floats and position: relative and so-on really aren't that hard to remember.

In addition to memorizing the rules, you'll also memorize the specific IE bugs; see a page in IE all messed up, and be able to go, "Oh, I know what would cause that," and be able to fix it without spending hours tracking down the bug.

Woo!

Comet in IE6? Can you elaborate a bit? I recently had a need for a comet thingy (but not cross-browser compatibility) - so I made a small solution with x-mixed-replace. I don't even know where would I start with IE6, since even later versions are their own world.

Comet has worked since the old netscape days, it just wasn't called "comet" back then. Long polling works fine in IE6.

Long polling is possible in every browser ever, basically.

In my case, it was less intermittent events and more low-latency streaming data (position/GIS stuff), so I went with the forever frame. It really is splendid for pushing data to the browser without the nasty lag.

I'm kinda the same way. I guess I got lucky with the way I learned, but rarely do I check my work in IE as I'm so sure it'll look fine (besides rounded corners and the like). I think anyone can get here, it just takes practice. :)

> but rarely do I check my work in IE as I'm so sure it'll look fine

That's pretty scary.

To me that sounds as though a programmer would say:

"I hardly ever compile my code on BSD, I'm usually sure it'll work just fine"

And I'd not believe him. In your case, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, but at the same time I'd urge you to test it anyway but that's from a programmers perspective again.

Thats how I write CSS. A good front-end dev can write one set of clean CSS for Chrome, FF, IE8 and IE7 with a small set of styles in an IE6-specific stylesheet.

Combine clean CSS with SCSS (http://sass-lang.com/) for mixin awesomeness and also PIE.css (http://css3pie.com/) for CSS3 on IE. Thats pretty much the winning combo IMO.

Will they hire someone remotely, especially someone with heavy ruby/rails exp?

If you like SASS, check out compass http://compass-style.org/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com