I think that it is becoming easier to make websites… It reminds me now about the end of the 90’s with the world-famous browser’s war between IE vs Netscape, but right now its becoming more webstandards compliant browsers vs IE.
What am i writing about ? In the sense of creating 2 versions of the same page: one – for standards compliant browsers and the other one for everyone’s bashing favourite – IE. In the old days people were doing 2 versions for Netscape and IE, and as of now we just have changed Netscape (which is powered by both Gecko and Trident) for the standards compiant browsers. With all the hacks that one have to use to adapt a design model for IE i do not hesitate to call it “a different version of the website”, though it largely depends on the design and its implementation. In the case of table-based design not much things needed to be changed especially for the IE, though if we are talking about fluid tableless design – the things are a bit complicated.
With the introduction of the 7th version of the Internet Explorer, it seems that some things are going to be easier, there are a lot of bug-fixes to see in the 1st RC of the Explorer, this way i have allready started to adapt the websites i am making (and have made) to include its support as early as now. No, its still far from being perfect, but i am considering it a nice step into the future, but it is turning the state of the 2 website versions of the into the 2.1 versions =O). By 0.1 version i consider including all those hacks and fixes that IE6 requires into the conditional commentary and separate CSS file, but its an important pass for decreasing the number of webdesigns per page which should happend exactly by the time IE6 is going to disappear from the website statistics.