Designing for different browser capabilities

[piratefan]

Can anyone tell me when it is necessary to design a site for different browser capabilities? I have been reading where some developers will have different designs for different browsers. Guess my main question is how do you know what to design for each browser?
Thanks.

 

[MichiganRon]

Ugh, I just got done ranting in thread215-728869 about this very issue. Well, sort of.

As you can probably guess, Internet Explorer has a very large user-base on the web. According to w3schools.com, 94% of web surfers use IE (

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp).

However, there is still that pesky, sometimes vocal minority who want to be able to surf too! Please read my rant in the thread listed above for my answer to your question. Basically, you should always write your code to look good in Netscape. If it looks good there, chances are that it will look good in IE too (as long as there's no javascript or CSS involved). That way you kill two birds with one stone (no offense to you avian enthusiasts).

Hope that helps,
-Ron

-We all play from the same deck of cards, it's how we play the hand we are dealt which makes us who we are.

 

[ChrisHunt]

There's a lot of rather dated advice out there on "html tips" websites to sniff for different browsers and serve them different content. That's how it used to be in the bad old "browser wars" days when browsers produced sometimes radically different results from the same HTML.

Modern browsers conform more-or-less to a common set of standards, so rather than produce multiple flavours of your site your time is better spent making sure it validates to those standards at

http://validator.w3.org/

. (You should still take time to double-check it on various browsers though).

Only if you're expecting significant numbers of visitors using old v4 browsers (unlikely for most sites) should you consider browser-sniffing.

-- Chris Hunt

http://www.extracon.com

http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk

http://www.napitalia.org.uk

http://www.leicesteryha.org.uk

 

[piratefan]

Thanks very much for the input. I am curious about something else. A newbie question I am sure. I have books on html and xhtml. What should a new guy like myself do? I am eager to learn this stuff but want to head the right way. I have been reading on both and am still not sure exactly when to use what.
Also, even though I want to understand the code at the lowest level, is html-kit a good editing tool to use to maybe save some steps? Any recommendations there?
Once again, thanks.

 

[MichiganRon]

1. HTML and XHTML are basically the same thing. XHTML is just strictly written HTML. In other words:

<P ALIGN=CENTER>Click<P ALIGN=LEFT>here

is a valid HTML statement. However it is NOT a valid XHTML statement. XHTML has strict standards which must be adhered to in order to be compliant. There are three things wrong with this code.

In order to be XHTML compliant, all tags must be in lower case. All attribute values must be contained in quotes. All tags must be closed. That makes the above code look like this:

<p align=&quot;center&quot;>Click</p><p align=&quot;left&quot;>here</p>

Writing XHTML code is not difficult. Everyone should be doing it.

2. HTML-Kit is a great authoring too. I use it. You can really learn a lot more from hand coding than using a WYSIWYG (IMHO). I'm not sure what you would be "missing" if you used HTML-Kit. It doesn't really do anything for you, it just gives you help. You still need to know which tags/attribs to use.

-Ron

-We all play from the same deck of cards, it's how we play the hand we are dealt which makes us who we are.

 

[piratefan]

Thanks Ron. Big help sir.

 

[piratefan]

I should have thought of this before the last post. I get the difference between the two. In general. I guess what really confuses me is the browser capabilities. Shouldn't you be catering to a bigger audience by using the XHTML?
Thank you again sir.

 

[MichiganRon]

At this time I don't know that writing code in XHTML will cater to a bigger audience (more browsers). However, in the future, some browsers may become more strict with their interpretation of code.

If you start off using XHTML now, you're already ahead of the game if that happens down the road.

-Ron

-We all play from the same deck of cards, it's how we play the hand we are dealt which makes us who we are.

 

[piratefan]

Will do and thanks.