Browser Compatibility, IE, FireFox, Standards

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One of the biggest challenges to web developers is accomodating the browser. Standards with the DOM and CSS have come a long way, and so has the implementation. (Before you start harping about "Internet Exploder vs. Firefart", do yourself a favor and review the over 200 behavior and other changes they baked in as of IE 7 RC1, which was released today, at the IE7 blog page and see for yourself).

So now that you have an RC for IE which basically means no more code changes until the next release, it's time for developers to start zeroing in on the defects and anomalies and workarounds for rendering, positioning and behaviors between different browsers.

I for one would appreciate some sort of a site that highlights the differences between say IE, Firefox and Opera, one-by-one according to type (CSS, DOM, script, etc) with workaround examples for each. A community site wiki - style, with some developer participation, would go a long way toward helping the community as a whole and cut down on the incessant flame - throwing from one camp to the other (which is currently reminiscent of the Middle East).
Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. RK12:19 AM

    Peter-Paul Koch's quirksmode.org [ http://www.quirksmode.org/ ], has some great content on browser incompatibilities & differences. You can look under the W3C DOM ( -> W3C DOM Compatibility tables ) menu from the main page or elsewhere ( http://www.quirksmode.org/bugreports/index.html , http://www.quirksmode.org/css/quirksmode.html ) on the site.

    ReplyDelete
  2. peterbromberg6:31 AM

    Thanks, Anil. I have seen this but I didn't realize the site went into such detail on this particular subject.

    ReplyDelete

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