Often in a website request for proposal you might see a bullet point requiring support for all browsers. This is an impossibility. If you support all of the older browsers, you will be so limited in terms of design that your site will look like it was built in 1996. If you design a modern looking site, it will look terrible in older browsers, and in some cases it won't work at all. Defining which browsers your site will support is an important consideration before designing it or before choosing a technology platform. Browser support is by far the hardest technical challenge facing web developers. But it is getting easier. The more browsers support official HTML and CCS standards (we'll talk more about CSS in a future newsletter), the easier it is to support multiple browsers and platforms. Today, sites look very much the same whether you look at them in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. But there are some differences.

The display differences between browsers are most noticeable when comparing Internet Explorer to any of the others. While standards compliance is growing (hopefully the new I.E. 7 will continue to move in this direction), there is still a gap between Internet Explorer and everyone else. I.E. supports roughly 90% of the latest HTML and CSS standards. That's good, but that still leaves 10% of official standards unsupported. Additionally, Internet Explorer has built in a few of its own unique features that other browsers cannot support. This means it's still possible to go to the same site in I.E., Firefox, and Safari and see subtle differences in how they are displayed. These differences are usually minor and often "degrade smoothly." In other words, the features simply don't display in one browser or the other without breaking the functionality of the site. Nevertheless, we still walk a thin line between including display features that will work in only one browser or the other. Usually, this means we leave these elements out, causing us to drop to a lower common standards denominator - an unfortunate trend that decreases our overall palette for web design. When it comes to robust web design, the majority of our work is in finding solutions for the smallest discrepancies where standards have been ignored or superseded. Alas, such is our lot in life.   next >