Browser compatibility guide

This page is part of Ron Mertens' web page guides.

I think that the most annoying part of web programming is that you have to support several kinds of browsers.
Every browser behaves a bit differently, and sometimes your web site will just 'break' under one browser or another.


Standards

You'd think that if you go by the 'book', following the standard for HTML or CSS, you'd be safe from browse problems. But this isn't so. Some browsers simply do not go by the standard, some adhere to just parts of it.

It's really nasty. And remember that lot's of users still use old browsers (Such as IE 4 or Netscape) and supporting those browsers while writing 'new' code with CSS is very difficult sometimes.

How to do it?

The only solution I know of is to test your site under all popular browsers. Just 'tweak' your site until it works everywhere.

Usually if you have a CMS-driven site, you'd be quite safe because the guys that wrote it made all the hard work of making sure it works.

Today's popular browsers

I think that you should make sure your site works okay at least under these browsers - All of those can be installed for no cost on your windows computer. There are also automatic tools for the job (web based) and lot's of material to be found on the web.

What's next?

You finished your web site. Now it's time to check your statistics...