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How Do You Test Your Web Pages?
Pieroxy asks: "As a web developer, both professionally and personally, I try to always make sure what I write works in every browser at my disposal. When the choice came for me to choose a platform for my PC, I went the Windows route, because I cannot afford not to test IE on all those websites/applications. But now I am facing a problem with all browsers that don't have a native Windows port, such as IE5/Mac, Safari/Konqueror. kde-cygwin helped very little because the version of Konqueror shipped doesn't display most JPEG, making any testing worthless. IE5 for Mac should die soon, but is still widely used as being the default browser for so long. How do you test your web pages? Have you noticed discrepancies on how a specific engine (Gecko, Opera, KHTML) renders content on different Platforms? Do I need a Mac and a Linux machine to make sure it is working on these platforms?"
This really depends on the type of page I'm working on. If it's a personal page, I make sure it works with Mozilla and IEWin, because those are the two browsers I have available.
If I'm working on a business project, I let the boss spec the work. If it's required to work under Safari and IEMac, then they have to provide a Mac for me to develop with, not just have somebody else test it.
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
If you have a significant other (I'm married, so I do), sell them on getting a Mac. I bought an iBook for my wife, so I can test on my laptop (w2k), her Mac, and Linux by booting from my handy Knoppix CD.
That covers the base pretty well.
Of coures, it's always wise to generally try to avoid dicey display tricks that you know will probably give you problems... or if you absolutely *must* have that stock ticker, don't code it yourself -- find one whose creator is doing the testing for you.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
I have a PowerBook that I do my web development on. I then use Virtual PC to test the windows IE stuff. I have found that the Mozilla rendering engine on windows/mac/linux is pretty much the same, i.e. testing on one is good enough for all (granted I try and stick with writing things once and having it work everywhere so its the safer (X)HTML/CSS).
Actually. You can get a program called PearPc which allows you to emulate a mac. It's was in constant developement before one of it's programmers got hit by a train.