Everybody (at least all of us interested in web development) has been following and chatting about Chrome, the new browser from Google.
I personally care about how web pages will render in Chrome versus other browsers. I looked at the Google Chrome FAQ for developers and found this explanation about rendering differences:
"
9. My site renders differently in Google Chrome than in Internet Explorer
Google Chrome uses a different rendering engine than Internet Explorer, so may display web pages differently. Apple Safari uses the same rendering engine as Google Chrome (WebKit) and should display pages the same way.
"
I have some observations regarding the above statement:
1) There are 17 entries in the FAQ for developers and 6% is devoted to cross browser compatibility. To me this is a huge percentage and it means that the number of pages that actually render differently in Chrome is probably very high. -- Well... if about half of Fortune 500 companies have syntax errors on their home pages, what can you expect??
2) Up until today the market share for a Safari (webkit) based browser is still low and therefore a rendering difference might not have been that important depending on your audience. -- still... shame on you for not writing cross browser compatible code! Or.. was it your fault?? (this is a discussion for a different post).
3) Google has the potential of altering market share numbers for browser utilization (we'll see how Google can change this in the next few months). -- This means that you should at least add Chrome or Safari as one of your test environments!
4) Once more, web standards and page validation are endorsed by a large Internet player (GOOGLE!!) as the way to fix the browser compatibility problem. -- So... do you think web standards are important or not??
If you read some of my other posts in this blog you will find that I am building a practical argument in favor of web standards. I am not advocating for web standards from a theoretical point of view but from a very pragmatic one. If your code is web standards compliant or at least if your code validates your are on your way to solve many many potential problems around cross browser compatibility, search engine optimization, accessibility, performance, etc. Web standards are a guide that you should follow in your daily coding.
aggiorno can simplify dramatically how you can make your page standards compliant with many of its aggiornings that are there to clean up the web without taking a toll on developers productivity. How come we still have some many SYNTAX errors on our pages? How do we expect browsers to behave consistently if we are not consistent in the use of the language and if browsers have to " guess" our intentions? Let's standardize our pages! Let's use aggiorno to help us in this endeavor.
References:
Web Standards and SEO
Accessibility and Web Standards
Even the gurus sometime slip...
Clean HTML: why not??
PS: of course I am biased but I truly believe aggiorno is a superb product! Why wait? Try aggiorno out. It has two modes of operation: as a stand alone web tool that includes a sophisticated XHTML/HTML editor and as an add-in for Visual Studio 2005/2008.
