The Wrong Game

Five months ago I wrote this post about SBS' Worldgame website. Well, as a result of a supreme case of boredom I decided to investigate what exactly was causing the problem. Yeah, I should have done this months ago, but basically I didn't care and I still don't. And the reason I don't care is that the problem still exists. It's not with the webpage - which I successfully found a route around - but with the web designer's laziness.

When I design a web page I test it with every browser I have available. Not just Firefox or Mozilla (my browsers of choice) but IE, Opera, Lynx, Konqueror and Amaya. I've even been known to borrow time on my friend's Macs to test my pages with Safari. Now, I'm not what I call a serious web designer. I certainly haven't done it for money for years. But I do know many serious web designers and they follow a similar strategy. That's because web pages look different in different browsers. Each handles the HTML code in a different manner. It's getting more standardised but there are still a few instances where they differ.

The designer of The Worldgame site only bothered to test it with IE. I know this because the opening page doesn't work with any other browser. And the reason for this is because the page uses an ActiveX redirect. HTML has its own redirect and that works fine. It also works in every browser written in the last five years.

So the problem remains, but we've routed around it. A bit like the internet, really.