Internet Explorer (IE) is very forgiving. It will take all kinds of malformed HTML and make it appear to be perfect. Most other browsers try to be a bit more strict. As a result, HTML/XHTML markup and CSS styles that work on IE may not work in other browsers.
If you look at your web statistics, you will see that most people still use IE. Besides the people that have to run another browser because of their operating system, many of these non-IE people browse with Firefox (almost all operating systems) and Safari (Apple OS X). Smaller numbers of visitors will also be using browsers like Opera or Konqueror.
As a web developer, you want to write your code to one set of rules called Web Standards. Those same rules are carefully implemented by the browser. In a perfect world, you would write perfectly valid code, and all the browsers would render your site perfectly. But this isn't the real world.
After you make lots of pages, you will come to what every experienced web developer knows: browsers suck. You will have to account for various bugs in various browsers.
So, what's your best chance of having your site be visible to the widest audience? It's simple. Just validate your markup and styles.
Valid markup (HTML/XHTML) and styles (CSS) will most likely let your site render reliably in all browsers.
It is a good idea to use Firefox for your browser while you develop your site. Not only it is an excellent browser, it has a great plugin called "Web Developer" that will validate the markup you are looking at... and also help you in lots of other ways. If you use a standards compliant browser for development, you will develop markup and styles that are close to web standards.
Each time you come to a breaking point, validate your code. There are free online tools to validate your styles and another tool to validate your markup. After validation, you will generally see that your validated code will usually work fine in all those non-IE browsers. Congratulations!
After you have validated markup and styles, look at your site in IE. Most of the time IE 6 will also work. The markup should be ok, but the styles may not be. There are unique things to IE 6 you may have to work around (most famously, the broken box model). And if you care about IE 5.5 (most do) you have to account for a whole bunch of other bugs. You can handle all that with CSS stylesheets that account for different browser versions.
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by big greg 
last modified: 2005-07-11 09:04:49 |
