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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?"
Yes, code to the standards. I test with a gecko-based browser and Safari (khtml/Web Kit). Those two renderers bring you as close to the standards as you can get. And by testing against both you have a decent comparison for those vague parts of the standards.
MSIE's rendering is out of date. Microsoft crushed Netscape and then stopped working on their browser. If people want to see my web content they can damned well get a modern browser. Screw MSIE, screw the users who insist on using it, and screw bad browsers.
You can write perfectly valid code that fails to display properly in any major browser.
Then there is something wrong with the browser.
>The whole point of testing in browsers is to ensure that things work properly.
The whole point of standards is that you don't have to. They will, all by themselves, if the browsers are standards-compliant.
If I validate xhtml 1.1, that's the end of my testing phase.
To address your question specifically:
>How do you ensure that the HTML, CSS, etc you have chosen works with popular browsers?
By using standard-compliant xhtml and css. In and of itself, this guarantees that this will work in particular browsers.
Note that I semantize, and don't go for special effects. (None. Go to my site, you'll see. It navigates and looks the same in Konq, Safari, Moz, Op, Lynx and Links.)
"Piter, too, is dead."
I stick my penis in them.
That's right--you heard me. I stick my penis in them. Then I sort of wiggle it around a lot. Faster and faster. Mmm, yeah. Then I cum on them. It's fun... you should try it. Pages with a lot of JavaScript are especially nice on the old skinflute. Stay away from the ActiveX though--those things are sharp!
/ Mmm... website sex...