| There was a time, not so very long ago, that the World Wide Web was at war – The Browser Wars. The so called 'Browser Wars' really came about for two reasons: - HTML was never intended to produce 'fancy pants' layouts! HTML was really a standard technology created to help structure complex data (content) so it could be presented in a 'machine friendly' (i.e. computer) way.
- The browser manufacturers, principally Microsoft and Netscape, saw a commercial 'opportunity' to enhance and embellish the core technology/standard to enable the web designer to achieve 'pleasing visual effects'.
In fairness, and with the considerable benefit of hindsight, what the browser manufacturers did was necessary – imagine how far the World Wide Web would have progressed if you couldn't change the colour of your font, let alone apply 'corporate style' to the web site! The problem was that both Microsoft and Netscape delivered this new functionality in slightly, or even not so slightly, different ways. To compound matters, both companies realised that they needed to win customers at all costs and the only way they knew how to do that was to build the best (i.e. the most enhanced) browser application! With ever diverging technologies emerging in the Microsoft and Netscape browsers, coupled with a commercial demand for web designers/developers to deliver ever increasing sophistication, the situation was dark indeed. At the end of the 1990s it was common/necessary practice for the web developer to have to create two sets of markup and render the appropriate script based upon the browser being used! Either that or to dismiss one browser completely – remember the 'This site looks best in Internet Explorer' or similar messages? Crazy! Fortunately, the turn of the millennium saw common sense prevail; that and an increasingly unhappy web development community! The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) began to make its voice and its influence heard and, slowly but surely, browser manufacturers began to develop and evolve their products to accommodate the emerging standards. Today, whilst still not perfect, most popular browsers, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, FireFox from the Mozilla group and Safari on the Apple Mac, do a pretty good job of rendering standards compliant HTML/XHTML and CSS in a consistent and uniform manner. The benefit of this is that if your web site renders standards compliant pages, then you can be pretty certain that your customers will see your web site exactly as you intended – without the need for 'jiggery pokery' with your mark-up or resulting to complex JavaScript/CSS browser 'fixes'. To summarise: - Your web site will display consistently on a wide range of browsers and hardware platforms
- You will only need to create one version of your content
- It will help to make your site 'future proof' as the standards will be 'backwardly compatible', i.e. while browsers are made to render to the standards, your web site will be displayed as you intended it to be displayed
- You will not have to learn all the little tricks and foibles of this browser or that browser. Create clean, standards compliant content (Web Management Studio gives you the tools to do exactly that!) and you're done!
Finally, if you are still unconvinced and think that if your site looks good in Internet Explorer that's good enough, consider this: around 1 in 4 web users use a browser other than Internet Explorer (and this is likely, if anything, to increase). Can you really afford to ignore/alienate 25% of your potential visitors/customers by delivering a less than perfect web site? |