Sketch Blog

So Microsoft have a good product here, or don’t they?

Web development is becoming more and more difficult for us developers, especially front end development. Your project starts with an image from the designers with how the website should look like, and it is your responsibility to write an html code that will reflect the image. It is not simple, and it will never be. Even if you have the perfect HTML WYSIWYG you will still need to dive into the code to fix some stuff in order to reach the compliance with the standards out there.
The most difficult part of the front end development is to ensure that the site looks alike in different browser. At least it must look the same with IE, Firefox, and Safari. There is still Google Chrome and Opera if you want to prefect your site among all popular browsers. Also, we should not forget the different versions of browsers with no exception to IE. So as a developer you need to have all those browsers in your OS which makes it very difficult to maintain and sometimes impossible like installing all IE versions in your OS. This is why there are some web applications like browsershots.org that will generate snapshots for your website on different platforms. But don’t forget your site needs to be online in order to test it which is not the case when starting to develop the site unless you upload every change to a test server.
When I started to work on my latest project, I remembered that I bookmarked a blog that talks an easy way to test your web design. I don’t remember reading that blog, I just bookmarked it. So I went to delicious to see the blog post. It is titled “Microsoft SuperPreview: a New Way to Test Web Sites” and written by Craig Buckler. I said to myself ‘Not another Visual Studio Add-on. I just scanned down the blog and saw another interface. Wow, this doesn’t seem like something from Visual Studio. I returned back to the beginning of the blog and read it, then immediately downloaded the 250MB application which is labeled with March Preview.
My first impression when installing the application is satisfying. The installation UI seems very cool and got me excited about this app. When the application started it looked very strange. I mean there were no menu items. It looks more to a browser rather than a designing app.
It took me some time trying to understand how this app works. The first site to test is Yahoo! and the result was a pure image. I tried to click on some links but with no use, at the end this is a site preview application not a browser. I have added IE 6 and IE 7 as browser to test the compliance and as expected Yahoo! gave me a message to upgrade to the latest IE version when previewing the site using IE 6.
I know that this is a beta version but there are many issues to consider in the final release:
1. It must support all the major browsers; Microsoft already is already planning to.
2. There is a need to support resolution for previewing the websites, which is also in plan.
3. The most important is the support of interaction or sending events. We all know that modern day websites relay on XHTML for interactivity. So unless I am able to test those from the browser or I don’t know how the site will behave under different browsers.

I suggest you try it to see how much it will make your life simpler.