Re: Differences between IE and Firefox

by Charles A Upsdell <cupsdell(at)upsdell.com>

Date:	Thu, 03 Feb 2005 08:53:47 -0500
To:	hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org
Cc:	David Kendall <david(at)homepagesplus.com>
References:	ksbe upsdell
	todo: View Thread, Original

At 22:30 2005-02-02, you wrote:
>Fellow web slingers,
>
>I decided recently to put Firefox on my computer (and have made it
>the default browser), coinciding with my new computer purchase (a
>Dell), which also involved an OS upgrade (XP from 98).  However,
>viewing some of my designed pages in Firefox for the first time
>showed me that Firefox doesn't seem to render some things well.
>Either that, or it's bad coding on my part (probably the latter), can
>someone tell me what the differences are between the browsers in
>the following regards and how my code can be changed (if at all):

FF's HTML and CSS support is far better than IE's.

If you are going to make sure your sites are FF-compatible -- which you 
really should, since a lot of people are using FF and other Gecko-based 
browsers -- you are going to have to learn to code to the standards.

My policy is to design the site to work with FF, Opera, and other 
standards-compliant browsers, and then to make whatever changes are needed 
to enable IE's faulty HTML and CSS support to produce the results I want.

The first step to this is to ensure that the DOCTYPE you use will trigger 
standards-mode in the various browsers.  For example, right now you are using:

         <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

which triggers 'quirks mode' in many browsers, but if you truly want to use 
4.01 transitional per the standards, you should be using instead:

         <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

This way, when you view the results generated by the different browsers, 
you will be comparing apples to apples, and not apples to oranges.

One of the biggest problems when making sure that a site works with all 
browsers is that, if you use valid code, IE may produce wildly 
inappropriate results.  Often you can code around it, though it may take a 
lot if ingenuity, but sometimes you simply have to dumb down your site to 
the point that IE -- especially IE 5.01 and 5.5 -- behaves reasonably.  IE 
5.01, which comes with Windows 2000, and which is used by many corporate 
users -- will present the most serious problem, since its CSS support is 
terrible, much worse even than IE 5.5.

One of the biggest benefits to coding to the standards -- other, of course, 
than producing sites that are cross-browser compatible -- is that you will 
develop a more profound understanding of the standards, and THIS will make 
you a better designer.

[]  HTH, Chuck Upsdell

-
Chuck Upsdell, www.upsdell.com
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