Slashdot Mirror
Seeking a Browser Compatibility Reference?
Fr05t asks: "Gone are the days of being able to use the W3C specs for DHTML and Javascript as a solid reference for every browser. To make things worse I've been finding more and more I'm required to build richer web content that runs on all browsers. I've found many books that have a chapter on Browser Compatibility, but is there such a thing as a complete guide to the incompatibilities between IE, Netscape, and Opera? I'd even settle for a site dedicated to the documentation of the browser SNAFU."
Lycos' webmonkey has a basic chart.
Instead, why not look for tutorials on generating content which can be read by most everything?
See http://www.webstandards.org/learn/ for a good start!
NCDesign has a good list for NN/IE at http://www.ncdesign.org/html/list.htm which will tell you, by tag and by attribute, which versions of those browsers have the support within them.
Sure, it is still amazing that there is no Browser fully conforming to HTML 4 or CSS 2, both being W3C recs for years, but to what kind of "standard" would Netscape 4 possibly conform?
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
We've solved the problem by writing everything to HTML4.01 and using CSS for the layout.
It renders very nicely in IE. It looks almost exactly the same in Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, Amaya, dillo. It probably looks good for things like WebTV too. And it's perfectly useable in links or lynx.
I know you're going to say "But it looks like shit". Fuck you. the web is about content. You think Slashdot got to be popular because it's loaded with flash animations and background midi music?!!
It looks OK, it's got 'content' that people obviously want to read, and it works with practically any browser.
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MacEdition has a good writer who tirelessly flogs web standards. She has several guides to cross-browser CSS support at the bottom of the page.
O'Reilly's Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference does an excellent job of describing which browsers support various functions and each HTML tag.
First off, the browser stats vary dramatically by site. The stats I've been seeing lately have IE 6 ahead of 5.x (probably due to sales of computers with XP, Windows Update, and the gentle nudging toward v6 because of its standards support).
If you code a page for the quirks of IE 5.x and tweak from there, you are coding for the past. It's quite clear that browsers are moving toward W3C standards support, not away from it. If you code toward the standards and tweak from there, you are much more likely to build a site that will stand the test of time and not break in newer browsers.
As for availablity, if you code for valid XHTML, CSS, and WAI (accessibility) guidelines, older clients tend to degrade gracefully. Using "tricks" like specifying media="all" in stylesheet link tags or using @import makes it easy to code to modern browsers but make the content available to older browsers (like Netscape 4).
XHTML+CSS with no tables and proper stylesheet declarations can make for beautiful sites that are both accessible to those with disabilities and browsers all the way back to Netscape 1.x.
It requires that you give up on making Netscape 4 and IE 4 pretty though. But it sounds like you've done that already.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.