Web Design

It is often asked whether it's really worth designing for as many different browsers as possible, when Internet Explorer has such a dominant position in the browser market. Some 85% of web page hits come from one version of IE or another (see the statistics available on the browser news page, which will open in the second browser window). The question answers itself, though. Even if 85% of readers come through IE, that's still 15% who don't. No sensible marketeer would deliberately choose a marketing strategy that simply excluded 15% of his/her potential customers: not when an alternative strategy was available that included 100% of them. That "alternative" - actually it's the only real one - is to write for all browsers simultaneously; an approach known as browser compatibility.

(Don't assume, incidentally, that IE's dominant position is somehow preordained or inevitable. As recently as 1997 Netscape still enjoyed a 75% market share; in 1998 it had dropped to around 50% but this was still comfortably ahead of IE on 35% (figures from Niederst, p. 7). Who's to say that another browser won't rise to prominence in the next five or ten years? If it does, what of all those pages which only look any good on IE?)

These and other philosophical/political arguments for ensuring browser compatibility are discussed properly in the printed booklet for Web Design. What I'm going to do here is look at the technicalities, although there aren't really that many. Good, correct and rigorous code is the best place to start, so validate your pages, and ensure they look OK when seen as text only, via a Lynx emulator or similar. Any page which passes those two tests is probably 100% browser compatible anyway. But there are a couple of other tests.

Avoid browser-specific tags. Browser manufacturers have been trying to introduce new tags for some time, as they give their browser a slight commercial edge. Some of these, it is true, have been useful, and since adopted into the HTML standards (though I have deliberately avoided including discussion of any such tags on this site - there aren't many, and at present, they're all still obscure). But the following tags, though they seem quite common and/or useful, are not recognised by one or other of the two main browsers:

Tags/attributes recognised only by IE:

    <BGSOUND>
    LEFTMARGIN and RIGHTMARGIN attributes (in the <BODY> tag)
    FRAMESPACING attribute (in the <FRAMESET> tag)
    DYNSRC (and related) attributes (in the <IMG> tag)
    <ISINDEX>
    <MARQUEE>
    BORDERCOLOR attribute (in the <TABLE> tag)
    <TBODY>, <TFOOT> and <THEAD>

...and ones rendered only by Netscape:

    <BLINK> (thank God)
    <KEYGEN>
    <LAYER> (and related)
    <SERVER>
    <SPACER>

Some style sheet properties are also browser-specific, such as those which render the scroll bar in different colours (IE only).

It is true that it won't bring the world crashing down if you decide you want a BORDERCOLOR of bright fuschia on your site and this doesn't render in Netscape or Opera. And most of these will be unknown to you anyway. But it might matter if you try and insert important information within a browser-specific tag such as <IMG DYNSRC...> (which allows you to play videos using the tag).

Of more importance is IE's ability to sometimes ignore bad HTML, such as missing </TABLE> tags. IE will often shrug this off, whereas Netscape and Opera will not render the table at all and half your page may disappear. Does this mean IE is a better, more useful browser? No! Closing tags is important, particularly if applying style sheet formatting. A page without properly closed tags is completely unpredictable and it will hardly do anyone's professional reputation any good if a page they designed and published is broken on 1 in every 10 visits, even if it looks OK the other 9 times. Would you accept a road being closed to you just because you were driving a diesel-engined car? Anyway, this is why properly validated HTML is the best step towards compatibility here.

You should also check out the page on designing for different screen sizes.

The only way to know for sure whether your pages look good on a variety of browsers is actually to look at them through those browsers. Anyone with pretensions to being even a half-decent web designer is fooling themselves if the only browser installed on their PC is Internet Explorer. At the very least, get yourself a copy of Netscape: Opera (which is free from http://www.operasoftware.com/ would also be a worthwhile investment. (If any browser is going to eventually challenge IE, it'll probably be this one: it's free, it's fast, and you can turn off pop-up windows, to name but three of the advantages it has over IE.) Use them yourselves to browse the Web - it'll show you the common problems with sites which lack browser compatibility, and thus help sharpen up your own design.

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Material on this site is © Drew Whitworth, 2005 Permission will usually be given to reproduce material from this site for non-commercial purposes, if credit is given. For enquiries, e-mail Drew at andrew [dot] whitworth [at] manchester [dot] ac [dot] uk.