Jeff Pritchard wrote:
There's an aspect of Rails development that I have found quite painful. Like many of you, I do my development on a Mac. Things go together quickly and easily for the most part.
Then I look at what I've done on a Windows machine (or even Mac FF) and two thirds of it is broken in some way. Sometimes minor placement issues, sometimes stuff just not showing up or buttons that don't do anything. Endless refactoring of the CSS and googling for hacks and all manner of painful machinations ensue.
I hear so little mention of this here that I suspect I must be doing something wrong or I'm missing some important reference or something.
Have the rest of you developed some process or "rules of thumb" or something that help you to avoid these issues? Is there another forum somewhere that I ought to be on to get help with this sort of thing? Are my pages just more complex than they should be? (sorry, site is still under wraps - can't show you).
thanks, jp
I've got to say I really sympathise with you. I come from a print background where you really do see what you get, and the design programs allow perfect positioning and control of type. Dealing with the limitations of CSS, and then trying to make it consistent across browsers is the single biggest pain I have faced in developing my site, and I'm nowhere near happy with where I'm up to so far.
My advice echoes some of the other comments. I subscribe to the A List Apart feed, would recommend CSS Mastery by Andy Budd as a slim but invaluable practical volume, and code for Firefox, then fix for Safari and IE (an Intel Mac and Parallels is a big help). Oh and plan on writing off a couple of hours each time you want to fix a tricky cross-browser issue.
Good luck, Chris