It is an unfortunate fact that browsers don’t all interpret the same code in exactly the same way. This is probably the biggest challange the web designer/developer faces in his daily practice.
Actually most browsers (the makers of them) try to comply with the international standards for interpreting web code (those set by an organization known as W3C) and do a pretty good job of it. So for the most part it’s pretty easy to make a website that agrees with all major browsers… except one.
Internet Explorer (IE) still to this day (even with the advent of FireFox and the growing popularity of Apple’s default browser, Safari) remains the most commonly used browser… and it is one of the worst. Not only has it fallen behind in many areas as a web browser, there are some standards which the makers of IE, Microsoft, apperently don’t even intend to catch up with.
However the case may be, we can hope and pray that in the near future IE will either get with the times or somehow disappear (as some might hope), but we can’t avoid the fact that the majority of today’s web users will be using it instead of a more ideal browser.
There is however, some degree of acceptable compromise to this unfortunate neccessity to conform to the limitations of IE. Particularly in the area of design, where one might wish to take full advantage of the latest features proposed for CSS (the styling language of the Internet), one can create a more simplified version of the site style specifically for IE to use, then just go nuts on the styles for the other browsers. IE can be made to ingore designated code rather than attempt it’s execution of it (which may otherwise be a shotty attempt).
In the event that it is required for the site to be exactly the same on all browsers, it may be neccessary to use more and bigger images (slowing the load time down), or compromise the design with something a little simpler. As the important content of a website should also be able to work on older browsers, using images has it’s definite limits. Any time text can be acheived as text and not rendered as an image, the page will load faster, it’s easier to go back and edit and that text can be read by search engines (a plus if you’re trying to acheive higher search engine rankings).
Aside from these exceptions, there is also the case where a website need only to be coded for a particular browser. Such is the case, for instance, when building a website specifially for the iPhone. This takes the “chore” out of web design and makes it quite fun. Yet still, it is important that the website doesn’t just work well by chance, but utilizes proper code (to the best of one’s ability). Browsers do change over time, and depricated code can be expected to be unsupported in future updates of any given browser.
Generally speaking though cross-browser compatibility is important enough today that a web developer needs to stay informed as which browsers are used most, and to “test, test, test!” as they say in this industry.
Tags: browsers, compatibility, cross-browser, Internet Explorer
