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You've just
created your beautiful web page complete with
graphics, sounds and all the bells and whistles
you can think of. You open up your Internet
Explorer version 6.0 and everything looks
absolutely perfect. You then put your page up on
the Internet for all the world to see and the
next day you get the following email.
"Dear sir, I just
went to your site to buy some multimedia
products and much to my shock and horror, it was
totally blank. Is your site down?"
You scratch
your head wondering what the problem could be.
You write to the person, trying to get as much
information as you can and eventually discover
they are using Netscape version 5.0. You don't
have the browser on your computer so you go and
download it just to see if you end up seeing
what the puzzled visitor saw. Sure enough, you
go to YOUR web page, the one that displayed so
perfectly on I.E. 6.0 and when you open it up in
Netscape 5.0 you see absolutely...nothing.
Welcome to the
battle of the browsers.
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Unfortunately
as the years progressed, and with it the
enhancements to HTML itself, the differences in
the way each browser handled these enhancements
became as wide a chasm as the Grand Canyon
itself. And if you think Netscape and I.E. are
ever going to get together and play nice, you'd
better think again. It is NOT going to happen.
So how do you
deal with this problem? How do you design a web
page that will display correctly on I.E.,
Netscape and every other browser in existence?
The honest answer is, you can't, but since most
people use I.E. 6.0, Netscape and Mozilla you
can at least program your web pages to try to
accommodate the majority of the visitors you
will receive.
The main
problem you will find between I.E. and Netscape
is layers and how they are displayed. In plain
English, layers are areas of your web page that
you can set up the exact pixel position where
you want something to appear. This gives you the
most control over how the layout of your page
will look, even more so than using the [table]
tag. The problem is, Netscape has created its
own way of handling layers with the [layer] tag.
The reason this is a problem is because the
[layer] tag is not compatible with I.E. So in
order to make your web pages generic between the
two browsers use the [div] tag instead. This tag
will work in both I.E. and Netscape and for the
most part your pages should look similar in both
browsers though there may still be some minor
differences.
There are other
differences between the way browsers handle
tables, graphics and other items. We will try to
cover some more of those differences in future
articles. But with the ever constant change in
HTML and how browsers handle the code, your best
bet is to go to http://www.w3.org/. Here you
will find the latest reports on HTML, CSS and
just about everything involved with making a web
page. This way you'll be assured of always being
right up to the minute on the latest advances
and problems.
Michael Russell
Your Independent guide to
HTML
Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michael_Russell |
