Cross Browser Compatibility

• Cross-browser means a website works in any browser and any version of the browser, being used.
• The goal of cross browser compatibility is to make website viewable in the major browsers available and have the pages render correctly.
• But variety of browsers and different versions of the same browser fail to support various design techniques, which complicates cross-browser compatibility even further.
• Inconsistent views across multiple browsers can create cross-browser compatibility issues. Cross-browser compatibility issues are caused by errors within the website code.
• Most of the cross-browser compatibility issues are cosmetic in nature as they only affect the view of web page not the function of the website.
• Some commonly occurring cross-browser compatibility issues are as follows
  • Image border – sometimes browser adds borders to the images, even though they are not present around the image while looking in any other browser.
  • Image rendering – some browsers render resized images in an extremely poor manner which causes image blocky and edgy.
  • Expanding box – if the content of text or images don’t fit in the given length and width of the box then box size expands to fit the content.
  • Fonts – some fonts only compatible with the web pages such as Arial, Georgia etc. and some are not compatible like Arial Narrow. So font type must be chosen appropriately.
  • Font rendering – different browser render font in a different manner. Such as light type on dark background.
  • Font size – different browsers and operating systems resize text differently.
  • Margins inconsistencies – different browser have their different values and view of elements such as different values for padding, borders and margins, because of this view of website differ on different browser.
• For creating cross-browser compatible website following points must be taken into consideration
  • Use only standard complaint code.
  • Don’t use browser specific HTML tags and features.
  • Validate web pages using w3c validator. Some tools like BrowserShots and Adobe Browser Lab are also useful for checking cross-browser compatibility.