Browsers to account for?

In my experience there is no browser that is strictly conformant to W3C standards. That beast just doesn't exist. The major browsers have all taken a turn toward conformance/compliance, yet they all still have proprietary HTML tags, CSS attributes and DOM quirks. To be really be thorough on the subject you'd have to break it down to each standard (HTML4, HTML4.01, XHTML1.1, CSS1, CSS2....etc.)

For that reason, I write for the majority of my audience first, IE, then go back and fix it for whatever part of the remaining 5 to 10 percent that is economically reasonable.

It may not be true since the full release of Mozilla, but prior to that, Opera was widely considered the most standards compliant browser. If my memory serves me the original Opera engine was written by the same guy who wrote the CSS1 spec.

I mainly use Firebird 0.7, but most people use IE, either 5 or 6. On Macs, they use Safari and in some cases IE5 because some pages on Safari don't display as well since there are the little proprietary codes that IE uses. And since Netscape 6.x and 7.1 are both based on Mozilla, and you can see right off, if you look a little bit, that they use the Gecko engine, those are taken care of. If you want the long list of browsers, go to <A HREF="http://www.bravenet.com">www.bravenet.com</A> (I hope this turns out right, as I used quick reply) and get one of their counters. Put it anywhere, click the site stats link, and click on the browsers link. I used it a little bit, and found all of my (21) hits :> came from IE on Windows XP, at verying screen resolutions, which can also hash up a site's displaying.

What a conversation this has turned out to be. Have to agree with dM, though:



I can guarantee you that I've speant more of my time trying to understand how to do crossbrowser compatability than any other single given task.

I'm close, but still no cigar, and I think dM hit it on the head.