Different Design on Different Browsers

If you have every looked at your blog in different browsers then you would notice your design, font and, colors may look different between browsers. This is a problem with no escape which makes web designing a lot more difficult.

Everyday engineers from World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are creating and implementing new coding for the web. When new coding is created it maybe marked as draft (testing) for months and even years before its made standard in all browsers. When W3 marks coding as standard it will then be enforced that all browsers support the coding. If browsers do not support the coding it will render as default by browsers.

Something many people are not aware of is coding has different types of languages. Many of you maybe familiar or at least heard of HTML. But what you may not know is HTML has many types among its self. HTML has been around since the late 80's and was just called HTML at that time. Later on the idea of HTML was added onto and in November 24, 1995 HTML 2.0 was released. Currently we are on HTML 4.01 with HTML 5 in draft. HTML 5 should be made standard in the following months of 2011. This is all just a brief history on HTML and as I said their are many other types of coding languages such as CSS, JavaScript, Java, PHP, XML, eg.  Each of these have their own standards and draft (levels) coding as well. 

Why does this cause compatibility issues?

Some browsers such as Firefox and Chrome will implement draft coding even know its not made standard yet. Then browsers such as Internet Explorer stick to only using standard coding. So for an example if you were to use coding to make the corners round or to display shadowing in your template which is CSS 3 and HTML 5. You would run into browser compatibility issues when using Internet Explorer 8 (or earlier)  because those types of coding are still in draft. You can use Internet Explorer Conditions as a cure for many alignment issues.

Even when using coding that is standard does not mean it will look the same between browsers. This is another issues that you may see on your blog. each browser is designed by different engineers which use different methods for the browser to interpret and render the coding. So even know the language of coding is supported in your browser it does not mean it will look the same in a different browser. With this problem you may see a color display darker or lighter between browsers or some font may look different although its the same font.

The font brings me to another issues which follows the rules of coding in draft. Some font may work fine on Firefox while Internet Explorer renders as New Times Roman (default browser font). This is because the font is still in draft which means Internet Explorer does not know how to render the font. So when something can not be rendered it will use the browser default instead.

We see another problem with font which is font packages on your computer.Windows 7 will have the most current font packages which Windows XP may not have installed on it. This all depends on the updated you have received on your computer. You can always go onto the Microsoft or Apple site and find font packages for your computer.