Browser Compatibility, IE, FireFox, Standards

One of the biggest challenges to web developers is accomodating the browser. Standards with the DOM and CSS have come a long way, and so has the implementation. (Before you start harping about "Internet Exploder vs. Firefart", do yourself a favor and review the over 200 behavior and other changes they baked in as of IE 7 RC1, which was released today, at the IE7 blog page and see for yourself).

So now that you have an RC for IE which basically means no more code changes until the next release, it's time for developers to start zeroing in on the defects and anomalies and workarounds for rendering, positioning and behaviors between different browsers.

I for one would appreciate some sort of a site that highlights the differences between say IE, Firefox and Opera, one-by-one according to type (CSS, DOM, script, etc) with workaround examples for each. A community site wiki - style, with some developer participation, would go a long way toward helping the community as a whole and cut down on the incessant flame - throwing from one camp to the other (which is currently reminiscent of the Middle East).

Comments

  1. RK12:19 AM

    Peter-Paul Koch's quirksmode.org [ http://www.quirksmode.org/ ], has some great content on browser incompatibilities & differences. You can look under the W3C DOM ( -> W3C DOM Compatibility tables ) menu from the main page or elsewhere ( http://www.quirksmode.org/bugreports/index.html , http://www.quirksmode.org/css/quirksmode.html ) on the site.

    ReplyDelete
  2. peterbromberg6:31 AM

    Thanks, Anil. I have seen this but I didn't realize the site went into such detail on this particular subject.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FIREFOX / IE Word-Wrap, Word-Break, TABLES FIX

One of the most annoying things a developer (who would normally delight in writing code, not futzing with markup) can have is getting rendering issues between different browsers. The two biggest players are of course Internet Exploder and Firefart (as I lovingly like to refer to each). In most cases that's going to take care of 98 percent of your total site traffic. IE has had a proprietary "word-break" style attribute for a long time, and this made it into the CSS 3.0 spec. But that doesn't necessarily help you with Firefox right now. Firefox literally - (and I consider this completely idiotic, since it's been in their bug database for FIVE YEARS) does not have a reliable CSS style element to force table cell content to break in the middle of a word in order to stop the content from expanding your table / div off the page or over other content on the page. Here's a partial fix, which will work for most tables and browsers. The style declaration (I call it m
Read more

Some observations on Script Callbacks, "AJAX", "ATLAS" "AHAB" and where it's all going.

I've taken a more than cursory interest in the whole Remote Scripting (.NET species) vs. AJAX and now ATLAS discussion, mostly because I started using Remote Scripting since Microsoft first released it, and because I continued to refine it after seeing Brent Ashley's excellent work with JSRS, which was one of the first "real" cross-browser solutions back in 2000 (that's the turn of the Century for you history buffs). Now Bertrand Leroy, a Microsoft guy whose work I like , has authored some very interesting ASP.NET 2.0 script callback stuff that he points to on his blog, and he is obviously (at least, to me he is) involved quite heavily in the development of this new ATLAS infrastructure that they'll preview at PDC. Leroy's most recent post brings to the surface what I agree are the major differences between the "AJAX a - la .NET" approach as popularized by Michael Swartz with his AJAX.NET library, and Leroy's RefreshPanel, the ASP.NET 2.0 b
Read more

IE7 - Vista: "Internet Explorer has stopped Working"

Image
This one was a bitch. All of a sudden for no reason at all, out of the blue, I get this dialog "internet Explorer has stopped working". I didn't install any new software, crap- I didn't do anything! So here I am using FIREFART to go on the internet and find out what to do! Damn! Good thing I've got the sucker on the same machine (I'm not "anti-Firefox", i just don't use it that much except to check my page renderings). The Fix The fix (at least for me): 1) Go into Control Panel, and choose "Internet Options". 2) Under the "Advanced" tab, press the "RESET" button at the lower right: Don't ask me why this happens, or why the fix works. That's a BUG, D00D - I don't care how you slice it!
Read more