Datasheet
CHAPTER ONE FUTUREPROOF SURVIVAL TECHNIQUES
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Learning to Adapt or Evolve
You know what’s going on, and you have a clever plan to provide a service that will be the
envy of your competitors. Fantastic! Next on the agenda is deciding how to adapt your
best-laid plans to particular environments. If you get dropped into a jungle, you don’t act
like you landed in Siberia. Likewise, online, you’ll need a box of tricks to cope with the
many di erent requirements a site may throw at you. Every site is di erent, as is its audi-
ence. Your job is to be prepared to nd the answers to the di cult questions that environ-
ments can present.
Taking advantage of new technologies
Although you don’t want to use every new technology just for the sake of keeping up
appearances, you also don’t want to let your concern over compatibility get the better of
you. In an e ort to appease the “old ones” (for example, Internet Explorer 6), many web
designers have failed to take advantage of CSS3 (for example) purely because it creates
inconsistencies with a browser’s older counterpart. Although I’m all for compatibility, as I
said earlier in this chapter, trying to be pixel-perfect is neither worth the e ort nor possible.
Compatibility should always be possible because of the following:
> If everything is disabled, content is the one thing that remains visible.
> Many technologies, when unsupported, can have an appropriate alternative.
> Targeting speci c variables allows you to o er independent fallbacks.
Going beyond the bare necessities with your code is, of course, entirely possible. If you
want to provide a particular piece of functionality, make sure you have a fallback (alterna-
tive) for users who are less fortunate. Such functionality can work against making a site
ubiquitous, but that will occur only if you fail to update the site as new and better solu-
tions arise. Ideally, rather than restrict yourself to a limited layout, train code around
issues as they appear (see Figure 1-7).
As a web designer, you have a responsibility to your clients and customers. Failings on
your site raise the risk of losing visitors, even if the failings are just small, but annoying,
quirks. Knowing how to write code for a site helps you understand in advance where expe-
riences can falter, provided that you take steps to ensure that your work ows and
responds appropriately to user interaction and the environment in which it’s consumed.
If you ignore the signs, however, issues are likely to occur and reoccur.
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