Nowadays there is a great number of web browsers you may use for web surfing and all of them have different standards. What are the very differences between the browsers? The thing is that they use HTML, CSS and JavaScript with some distinctions, whether only cosmetic or serious ones which may even break the website. That is why sometimes a website runs in one browser but fails to load in another one,so the web developers should cope with these differences somehow. And as you cannot guess what exact web browser a person will use for viewing web pages, the solution is to make a website fully compatible which means that it will appear more or less the same in all popular web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and others.
Of course, “full compatibility” doesn’t mean 100% compatibility with all existing web browsers as it is just impossible, but you still can make the most out of it involving the most usable and popular ones. In order to implement it a web developer should write blamelessly clean code which will correspond the W3C standards of browser platforms, which will help you to get steadfast results. Here are some suggestions for you to cope with cross browser compatibility issues.
HTML Editors
While using HTML editors you should mind the following features:
- using Dreamweaver is the best choice concerning compatibility issues but you should convert layers to tables for their proper use
- FrontPage editor uses Microsoft and thus contains code specifically for Internet Explorer, that is why it may load with problems and its items won’t work with other web browsers.
- in case you make use of other HTML editors you should test the code they generate.
CSS Style Sheets
Style Sheets seldom have problems with web browsers but still your web page may appear unreadable. The major problem CSS possess lies in the major positioning as many browsers do not support it, so thus not all the style sheets will work properly within all web browsers.
Flash
It is great to use flash technology for adding interactive features to your web pages, all the more there are plugins for all popular web browsers. But be careful with exaggeration of flash because not all devices may support the very technology.
As a conclusion it should be said that the best way for the web developer to create cross browser compatible website is to test web pages in all major web browsers before starting up, and to take into account the facilities of used editors.