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I am learning how to program and my goal is to build a simple functional prototype...I'm at the very beginning.
I am not concerned with the visual design at this stage, other than as it relates to being able to demonstrate the functionality.
My question is: do I need to worry about ironing out cross-browser bugs in the HTML/CSS, or can I do development on a single browser? (Perhaps a better way of asking this is does the back-end programming have any effect on which browser is displaying it).
If you are at the very beginning and only want a functional prototype, do not worry about cross browser HTML/CSS. In fact forget the CSS altogether and focus on printing just standard HTML. Since the visual design will change, focus on the content, styles can always be applied and switched later.
If you need Javascript/AJAX stuff I would recommend using a library like JQuery that has already solved many cross browser problems for you.
The back-end stuff "Perl, PHP, Python, etc" shouldn't care about the browser as it is simply printing text for the browser to render as it will.
The back-end programming will affect the way a given browser displays your page and there might well be two schools of thought on whether you should be picky about the browser compatibility issues.
On the one hand, if you're just finding your feet in web development it might be asking too much to expect to have a standards-perfect, cross-browser site or application every time. It might be better to focus on actually accomplishing a finished result and learning as much syntax and technique as possible.
On the other hand, it might be argued that it's a good idea to get into the habit of adopting good practices now and recognising the sorts of things that are going to give you headaches... probably when you view your page in Internet Explorer. This takes more time to reach a finished product, but it would teach you good habits up-front.
Really it comes down to your own approach and preferences. Do you want to be detail-oriented and turn out a polished result in a longer period of time, or would you prefer to just get to the finish line and identify issues on a case-by-case basis?
Do car prototypes have a working stereo, leather upholstery, chrome rims, dice, and other random stuff which does not demonstrate the functionality of the newly-designed car?
My rule of thumb is that if it takes you more than 10 minutes to make it look acceptable to others (I'm completely fine with a disgusting design when prototyping), you're spending too much time on the aesthetics and less time on the actual clockwork.
What good does a "pretty-looking" site do if it has no functional layout?
This depends on both your audience and on your tooling. If you are trying to support all users on all browsers, then you will certainly need to do testing on those browsers (although actively developing on those browsers may not be necessary), whereas if you only need to support WebKit-based browsers (Chrome, Safari) or WebKit-based browsers and Firefox, that is less testing that you need to do.
It also depends on your tooling. For example, if you are writing directly in HTML and CSS, then you are much more likely to run into browser compatibility issues. However, if you use a tool such as GWT, which can generate browser-specific output automatically, there are fewer such issues to deal with.
Note that you can use Selenium (aka WebDriver), to automatically test your code on multiple different browsers, even if you only actively develop within a single browser environment. That way, you can know if you've broken something, but not have to constantly manually test in multiple browsers.
I've been a web developer for quite some time and what has helped me in learning is to visually see what is going on.
That's the reason for Tools like Aardvark, Web developer, Firebug and many others.
But when i saw the Gecko Reflow Videos they just blew my mind.
Then my question is, is it possible to truly debug html (step through each element)? Or come close to it?
What i've been doing a lot is to use Aardvark and remove elements but Aardvark has its issues with "background" and same size elements and not being able to target those.
UPDATE: I've been trying to write a good update for this question since it has left me thinking about it more. But since English isn't my primary language its been tough.
In the past years it's been the browsers who have had the task of being compatible with the standards. As they get closer to that goal, it is us who should be thinking about what we can truly create when browser compatibility is minimal, and if there are techniques we can utilize that makes rendering a page faster.
We can think of the past decades as the early years of HTML/CSS, where the main goal was just to get the thing to work. Now we should be looking for techniques that speed up the current process. An example of this is in the video above where the Gecko engine is running through the code twice. Why is that? And are there other instances where its doing unnecessary things (even though they work and are compatible)
This is something that clearly needs to be tested to be confirmed, hence my original question of a true debugger.
My $0.02:
"True" HTML debugging, in the sense you're talking about, is not technically possible, because there is no requirement of HTML user agents (web browsers) to render HTML elements in a particular order, nor is there anything like an atomic unit of execution like a "statement".
For instance, when rendering a table, should a user agent reserve space for each <tr> before rendering their child <td>s (breadth-first)? Or should it render each child <td> and each <td>s child and so forth (depth-first)? In practice, user agents make all kinds of guesses to try to render pages as quickly as possible. In other words, there would be no guarantee that debug-order will match actual render-order, nor should there be.
HTML can be thought of as an declarative language in this sense, in that it specifies what should be done (the page rendered to spec) but not exactly how to do it (exactly which order to render elements to the screen). In general, it's best to assume that everything happens at once, although the W3C does give some tips on speeding up <table> rendering based on how user agents should render <table> elements.
IMO, the webdev toolbar and Firebug are the best we've got, where we can edit/disable specific HTML elements and CSS rules.
ok - serious answer.
Judging by the comments on the sites that I've followed from that link, I think that you and I know that there probably isn't. There are a lot of smart blokes and blokettes on those threads, and they all seam to point towards the "no, this is all clever $4!# that wont help us in understanding rendering.
However, I think that what your question might want to emphasis is that rendering at a browser level is very interesting.
Let me just throw this one out there. Do you think that putting body { overflow: scroll; } as a default might speed us up just a little???
In my professional opinion, there's really only one effective tool for time-factoring / assessing / debugging within the html milieu: The WebDev Iterator
Personally, I feel as long as your HTML validates to W3C spec, isn't that all that matters? One should develop their HTML to spec and let browser companies worry about their bugs (which are pretty rare these days) than to focus on old browser mistakes of the past.
HTML Validator plugin for Firefox (aka Tidy) is all any web developer needs to see if their markup is correct, what's wrong, and where it's wrong.
Even if you could do true debugging, each browser parses HTML it's own way, so even if you could step through Firefox to see how a rendering bug occurs, that won't help you with IE or Safari/Chrome at all because they execute parsing in their own manner. This isn't like PHP, .NET or Java where the parsing of the code is the same for everybody, debugging makes sense there.
Then my question is, is it possible to truly debug html (step through each element)? Or come close to it?
You could probably step through the page rendering process by running Firefox under gdb, or modify an open-source browser to have a "step" button, but I really doubt this will achieve anything useful.
CSS isn't that complicated, everything is basically a box, with a width/height/padding/margin.. The problem with web-development (CSS particularly) is every browser implements rendering slightly differently (some more differently than others)..
If you want to know the render-order to speed your page load up, I'd say you're going about this the wrong way.. The browser rendering the page probably accounts for maybe 5% of the load time, the rest is page-generation time and network latency.
You could possibly shave 2ms of your page load by reordering some tags and using a different CSS positioning method.. or you could reduce the page-generation time by 200ms by caching, and half the network latency by setting up a second web-server nearer your users.. Compressing your logo better, or minifying your javascript would most likely improve load-time (universally, across all browsers!)
Basically, if you're concerned about load time, there are much better places to start. If you're concerned about how the page is being rendered, Firebug(-Lite) and http://browsershots.org (or a virtual machine or two) are all you need!
Our web application renders fast in some IE browsers, slow in others... It seems to be an HTML rendering problem... The first 10% of the page displays immediately, the last 90% takes up to 10 seconds, and this is static content. I've run with firefox/yslow, renders very quickly. Seems to be isolated to some users/configurations of ie. Quirks mode does not seem to make a difference.
Is there a tool or application that I can use to help me discover a rendering bottleneck? Am I doing something egregious in my code? Could it be a javascript issue? Any help or suggestions will be much appreciated. thanks.
Use Fiddler to look at the times to load images, css, js files, etc. In other words, is caching a problem? Javascript can definitely cause issues in different browser versions. There's lots of optimizations you find in some versions that aren't in others. Also, make sure your html is well-formed xhtml if possible. How the page is arranged can also affect life. If your document tree is deep, it may need to wait to render large sections until it reads all the child nodes. Another thing to note, certain toolbars and plugins do look ahead loading and can slow down life. An HTTP Proxy can help you watch what's going on network-wise at least.
Not sure if anything of those ideas might help your exact problem, but they can help life overall.
If it runs fast in FF or Chrome then it's a javascript issue for sure. IE7 is VERY slow in processing large amounts of script and complicated HTML. We had a sharepoint page that took 10 seconds to render in IE and sub 1 second in FF and Chrome. We benchmarked the page by adding a timer to the server-side processing and sending the output to the client via a Response.Write(). By doing this we could determine the server time to process the page and the client time to render the page (since you would see the timer results on the screen and then wait 10 seconds for the rest to render). The bottleneck was 100% IE on the client. This also explained why the speed was variable on different peoples machines, because depending on how fast the client machine was the page would render at some speed between 8-15 seconds.
We even had MS look at the issue and they confirmed that IE has a "rich rendering" engine which is slower.... IE8 runs much faster but that is no help to anyone today.
Are you using any behaviors in your CSS? I've seen behaviors bring an app to its knees if too many are used and/or if they affect too many elements. Check for any .htc files lurking around.
Of course behaviors only pertain to IE and they use JavaScript, so I'm sure different IE versions handle them more competently than others.
There is a special tool for such scenarios called dynaTrace which is available for free at this website:
http://ajax.dynatrace.com/pages/
This tool could really help you out because its tracking almost everything and its specially build for IEs.
Check for memory leakage in the script.
http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/closuresleak/index.shtml
Steve Souders gives an excellent presentation on 14 (simple) steps to improve the performance of your web pages:
http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/theater/archives/2007/08/steve_souders_high_performance.html
If it's hanging in the middle of the page, the first thing I would personally look to do is ensure or move all my JavaScript is at the bottom of the page.
IE is great at being a bad performer, particularly with JavaScript, so if you move it to the bottom, IE can render the page, then get on with processing the JavaScript.
I use HttpWatch for troubleshooting linked assets (images, script, css), network or HTTP related problems in IE. There's a free & paid version. Free is fine but you lose out on some nice features.
I'm looking for feedback on peoples experiences with developing sites that work across browsers. It seems to me there are at least two obvious ways to approach the task of making your site/webapp work across browser:
Constantly test across all supported browsers every step of the way; or
Pick a browser, get everything working in it as a reference implementation and then make all the other browsers match the reference implementation.
Each approach has an obvious drawback -- the problem with #1 is that you end up doing a lot of unnecessary work -- especially if you are developing a webapp that is going through a lot of iterations/prototyping/spikes etc. You will make a bunch of stuff work across browsers that will subsequently be discarded/removed.
The disadvantage to approach #2 is that while it makes the initial development much quicker and more painful it makes it much harder to figure out where some of the specific errors arose, especially for more complex issues -- whereas if you had been developing for all browsers at once you should catch it right away and know what change(s) introduced the problems.
A somewhat obvious third option would be a hybrid approach, but it seems to me that you would end up losing more by experiencing both of the problems with #1 and #2 than you would gain from the benefits of doing both.
What have you found to be the most effective way(s) to approach this challenge?
I’ve found that if you get too deep into developing a website without looking at other browsers you’ll quickly get to a place that is too much of a headache to debug. I consistently open my web pages in all the browsers I care about.
I strongly suggest you verify all browsers each time you make a large change to the site.
Make it work with all browsers up front. This will mean extra testing during development but will cause you less pain later. I find it's usually easier to diagnose problems if I've just developed the thing, rather than coming back later and trying to figure it out...along with a list of other issues.
It partly depends on whether you know it's going to have to work in all browsers up front. If you do, then you really are better off just making it cross-browser to begin with. You don't need to test that everything is 100% compliant every step of the way, but you should code toward that.
And really, it's not that hard, especially what with JS frameworks like jQuery and Dojo around that take care of the scutwork. If you find yourself continually battling one browser or another, you might want to reconsider your design, as you may have chosen to do things in a way that is inherently more difficult to do when cross-browser compatibility is important.
Well, you do #1, but you do it whilst greating a style guide. A litle bit like this: http://www.sitefromscratch.com/content/html-xhtml-css-testing.
So when designing a new site or design, you create a page containing the desired HTML for all the visual elements that will be used on your site. Ignore style for now, just use the HTML that makes the most sense.
Then you style it. Preferably, your style guide would be all on 1 page so it can be open in each browser you're supporting and all you need to do is hit refresh between changes, (avoid opting for several pages, because it will take you longer to inspect them all).
When you build your site, build from the style guide. If it's not in the style guide, add it and test it there first. If you discover a problem when building the site, (perhaps you didn't consider a particular element when it wrapped, for example), replicate and fix the problem in the style guide.
Here's the killer advantage: A new version of one of your supported browsers is released, what would you prefer to test, your entire site, or the style guide?
So that's the CSS taken care of, now you need to do that all over with your generic JS functions, if any.
I created an interface compatibility layer between the browser and my code - basically, I wrapped certain functionality and made the wrappers determine what javascript/html was needed.
As browsers change, you change this compatibility layer and you can leave the rest of your code alone.
If you have this layer in your architecture, the answer to your question becomes "whenever you want".
If you can get an enterprise lock-in then multiple browser support can become less of an issue, e.g. if your customers are all companies using Internet Explorer then why build the site to look good in Safari or Chrome?
If though you are making something for the general public then there is a hybrid approach I'd use which is that I use one browser to get all the functionality there and working and then test across browsers when I'm in that "pretifying" phase of the project. Initially the key is for it to work, then it has to look good.
I don't think I could see a logic to testing across all browsers as I initially fill out a form or do some other basic functionality as it could be a big productivity drain to test across at least a few browsers, e.g. IE 6 & 7, Firefox 2 and 3, Opera 9.5, Safari, and Chrome if one wants to get all the big boys, and at least a couple O/S as Safari on a Mac can be different than Safari on Windows, which is a lot of tests even for just one or two pages. On the other hand, near the end, this is when I can refactor my CSS and inline styling and make the code better for handing off for someone else to maintain, archive until a service pack project is planned, or keep some documents just in case something has to be done. Also, by waiting to clean things up, I can have more confidence in the final UI parts as these can evolve and change considerably over a short period of time.
I usually start out ensuring that all the HTML and controls that I write/use adhere to the specification.
Tools-->Options-->Text Editor-->HTML-->Validation-->Check Show Errors and choose your Target
This starts me out on a solid base. I functionally test new features in a single browser and then about once/twice a day test the full set of them across all browsers.
Using this approach, CSS and JS are the usual suspects when something isn't right, its rare that it's the actual HTML markup.
If you can do it right the first time. Do it then. It will probably never be right later.
Depends mostly on your experience, which could be applied to any programming activity including this one. If you know in advance what likely pitfalls you're going to have to avoid (eg. in cross-browser development, don't make it hard on yourself by trying to do something that is going to be a hassle in a different browser), then you can probably safely develop everything in one browser and then go in after it's done and tweak things to get it working everywhere.
I usually advise junior developers to keep all browsers open during development and to refresh each browser when making changes, but I myself tend to write everything with Firebug for support and then go back and see how it's doing in IE7 (etc) afterwards. Since I've been doing this for several years, most of the time I can predict what's going to be causing a headache and often immediately know where to look to fix it.
If you are new to Web Design/Development then getting things right in different browsers can be a chore at times.
However, it's really not that hard to get a website working in every major browser and coded towards the W3C standard. In my opinion EVERY designer/developer should do this out of principle, otherwise they are no better than they were in the IE years.
Develop cross-browser code, make sure it validates and never think about designing for one browser again.
While browsing with Chrome, I noticed that it responds extremely fast (in comparison with IE and Firefox on my laptop) in terms of rendering pages, including JavaScript heavy sites like gmail.
This is what googlebook on Chrome has to say
tabs are hosted in process rather than thread.
compile javascript using V8 engine as opposed to interpreting.
Introduce new virtual machine to support javascript heavy apps
introduce "hidden class transitions" and apply dynamic optimization to speed up things.
Replace inefficient "Conservative garbage colllection" scheme with more precise garbage collection scheme.
Introduce their own task scheduler and memory manager to manage the browser environment.
All this sounds so familiar, and Microsoft has been doing such things for long time.. Windows os, C++, C# etc compilers, CLR, and so on.
So why isn't Microsoft or any other browser vendor taking Chrome's approach? Is there a flaw in Chrome's approach? If not, is the rest of browser vendor community caught unaware with Google's approach?
Chrome's approach is difficult to write, and requires forethought from the developers. IE and Firefox are both attempting to move to a process-per-tab model, but due to backwards compatibility are not able to transition quickly. Chrome, being an entirely new browser build on a clean rendering engine (WebKit), was easier to write in this way.
They have crossed over from a web browser as a tool to view web pages, to a tool optimized to work for web applications. There may be some flaws in this initial release, but they are changing the game.
IE8 uses a similar individual process per tab module, though they do not use a single process per tab, but instead spread all tabs across a process pool.
#pix0r but they added a little thing in the bottom right corner so you can expand the text box any direction you want, which I love because I use a wide display and prefer to type in a wider screen.
Thats actually a WebKit feature, Chrome just inherited it.
Virtually all of these features existed in other browsers before Chrome. IE8 had process isolation for tabs. Firefox / Safari had most of the JavaScript stuff. Most browsers do their own memory management.
Chrome has a few unique features (hyperrestricted render processes, etc) which are difficult to put into other browsers due to add-on/application compatibility concerns.
The primary thing Chrome has going for it is an extremely hardcore focus on minimalism and high-performance. By focusing on these as their competitive advantages, they can appeal to users who find this area of focus compelling.
As time passes, I'm sure you will see the homogenization of features as the browsers attempt to one-up each other.
In the meanwhile, I still stick with Firefox over Chrome for the simple reason that Firefox is (i) non-profit and has a (ii) huge addon community.
Addons such as NoScript and AdBlockPlus are almost essential for me.
One chink in Chrome's armor is the fact that it renders these darned textareas on StackOverflow are so small that it's making my eyes bleed!
One chink in Chrome's armor is the fact that it renders these darned textareas on StackOverflow are so small that it's making my eyes bleed!
Yeah. I mentioned this on uservoice and got declined because the current size is evidently the default under webkit. Every other site I've tried with Chrome that uses textboxes to compose content manages to have a decent sized font. The default definitely doesn't work, but there's obviously some way to override it. Jeff needs to fix this!
Edit:
Jeff was nice enough to point out how to fix this problem yourself.
#pix0r but they added a little thing in the bottom right corner so you can expand the text box any direction you want, which I love because I use a wide display and prefer to type in a wider screen.
I also wanted to point out that Google completely built Chrome from the ground up, with the exception of using webkit, so they have some of the advantages of not having to not deal with old-code. And of course there is the INSANLELY cool/smart developers.
The biggest chink I've found is its lousy proxy support compared to IE, FF and Opera. So it's pretty much useless at work, render pages at random, and requesting authentication for the proxy, where the others pass it seamlessly.
That said on my home machine it works great, if it wasn't for the OTT EULA I'd use it now.
thing2k
One "flaw" about Chrome is that it uses more memory upfront than all of the other browsers. I'm just guessing that this is due to the overhead associated with all the separate tab management.
After it's been open for some time, however, it doesn't use more memory than other browsers.
Many companies play a game of "What's the least we can do to get the leg up?" Marketing creates a laundry list of features needed to be better than the competitors. Project management ensures engineers stick to those features for fear that the project will exceed the time allocated... which of course it will. There's not a whole lot of room in such a system for a big picture leap-ahead. The incremental improvements you see in products, and browsers, is a consequence.
You have to keep in mind that Microsoft primary business is Rich environement (GUI) Application. Web tool is a threat to them as it is platform independant (not promoting they main product).
Of course the IE team probably had figured something like that but... Microsoft definetly won't invest a lot of money in IE if what they are selling is a Rich application platform.