a forum for browsers compatibility and ways to deal with it.

Hi Nexia,
Great idea, browsers and their differences in rendering of web pages are responsible for many headaches.

Now days I don't think its possible with all the different browsers and platforms to get sites to look exactly the same everywhere. There is too many other elements to consider, such as people browsing the web with things like mobile phones.

Maybe as developers, what we should aim for is a site that gets its message across effectively to as many visitors as we can and displays the desired look to our main target audience.

I will add a browser compatibility topic to the forum.

On a global scale, it would be more effective if we all agreed on the one browser as a development standard. That would put the pressure on the other browser suppliers to conform to that 'de facto' standard.
The global advantage is enormous - instead of all authors having to cater for the idiosyncratic behaviours of all browsers, with the overheads in both thought and output for each person, developer or not, the difficulties would have to be overcome by a few small groups of browser developers.

As impossible as it is to design web pages and templates that will display correctly in all browsers and on all platforms, there are always going to be quirks. I have many colleagues and friends (their companies shall remain nameless) who write HTML parsing code to be used in web browser applications for a living, and let me say, its incredibly difficult to have the dozens of HTML parsing code out there put everything in pixel precise perfect position, every time, on every platform.




Browsers have been getting much better however, and this is noticeably as many different browsers start to adopt the same rendering engines (Gecko anyone?). Until all browsers hail the w3c as their god and all-knowing master, the webstandards.org project, co-founded by Jeffrey Zeldman (http://www.zeldman.com) will continue to fight for the rights of designers. Their goals include standardizing how HTML is rendered onto the screen, independent of the company who owns the browser, the browser version, the platform... EVERYTHING. I would like to think that as soon as XHTML 2.0 and CSS 3.0 become as standard as XHTML 1.0 transitional and CSS 1, we will never have to write browser-specific code again. I think that by that time, all browsers will display our code properly and perfectly on every machine.




Until then, try and be as forward-compatible as possible by using separating content from presentation as much as you can, because that is the wave of the future.

Yep, the content is what matters. For now though, the only way to produce clean. minimal HTML/XML etc. is by aiming at one browser. I reckon that every line of code, HTML ot whatever, which is designed to cater for environmental problems, as opposed to application problems, increases the complexity (unnecessarily) of the application domain.
This is the continuing mistake that has been made in the plethora of langauges since the 60s. As far as I can see, HTML is repeating those problems. Unless there is one standard to aim at, which works in so far as presenting the content in a manner understandable by the user, the IT industry is going on the path again of producin\g solutions uried in all sorts of redundant code. It is as if we, the developers, are trying to keep it complex.
For me, at least, I refuse to play that game. I aim at IE, and thats that. If others can come to some agreement as to which is the appropriate browser to aim at, I will gladly aim at that.
I reckon it is in all our interests to agree on a standard, and most certainly not necessarily Microsoft.

Damn it - I mistyped it - i meant buried in code, not uried

I notice that my typing is particularly bad at the moment. I can only ask that you forgive me because I have just been to the Espy to see Dutch Tilders. Look up esoteric in the dictionary if you do not understand this.
It was definitely worth it!

Well,
IE 6.0.x and Opera 7 both seem to display almost perfectly the same thing.
Netscape 7 does some insane font sizing though.

I usually develop my webpages for IE, because about 80% of all visitors I have use it.
Then there's a few on Gecko based browsers, and a few on Opera.
And there's even been 1 or 2 cases of Netscape 4.x browsers (is that Mozilla 4 based? Gecko is Mozilla 6 isn't it?)...

Anyway,
IE has support for almost all the features in css, which is the one thing I like about it (I develop on Win, so don't know anything about Mac browsers, I do some testing on Linux too.).
IE has support for just about everything,
if it wasn't for that I'd be using Opera or Netscape 7.

80.5% of hits come from IE
3.3% from Netscape
2.6% from Opera
Then there are some bots and Java plug ins.

What surprised me when I looked on my stats now was that almost 30% of all hits come from Win NT comps (not counting xp or 2000, didn't know that many people ran NT 4 any more...)

Agreed, all you can really do is tweak your design to display best in the browsers most of your readers use, and stick to standards so that things are as accessible as possible to everyone else.

So, what browsers do you test on? Sounds like a good idea for a poll.

I'm no expert, but here's what I do:

I test on IE5.5/windows and Mozilla1.0. If it works in those 2 browsers it most likely will work in all browsers. IE does *not* comply with w3c's standards -- in fact IE now is as bad as Netscape4.x used to be. Mozilla complies with the standards. So I read the specs at w3.org, use only what works in IE, and stick with that. When IE becomes more compliant I'll add features but there's no reason to use everything if it doesn't work in IE. (I don't care about NN4.x anymore.)

The whole point of the internet is to write content in a simple, generic form so that it's available for any platform. So you write a page based on structure first (h1, h2, h3, p, dfn, em, ol, ul, dl, blockquote, pre, code, etc), and then add aesthetics (which really are optional) in the stylesheet. It doesn't matter if things look different in different browsers -- it shouldn't matter as long as it looks acceptable. Browser sniffing and such is needless.