I have a site, here, that I'm working on which uses some html5 and css3 elements which obviously do not load correctly on certain browsers and i have a few questions about what I can do and I don't have much experience with any codes like php or javascript. these questions are kind of a mess as well - I've been searching all over not really sure of what I should be looking for.
How would I go about creating a popup based on which browser is being used, if possible?
I understand that I can use conditional comments for IE but IE is not the only unsupported browser. Is there a way to activate certain elements, or div's depending on the browser?
How would I go about creating a version of the site that would be shown instead of the unsupported version?
Is there a better way to do this?
These questions may not be the right ones - if not and you know an answer to the question I'm looking for, please, go for it! Thanks!
There are a few tools I would recommend:
Modernizr
Feature detection, allowing you to target features in CSS and JS. It doesn't add features, just lets you test for them.
Includes HTML5shiv functionality Also does a lot more – if you don't use the other features, then don't use it, it does slow down page loads, but is worth it if you need it!
HTML5shiv
Very small, allows you to use html5 elements in IE, nothing else.
CSS3PIE
Lets you use border-radius, gradients and box shadow in older versions of IE. Also can allow PNGs in IE 6. Adds a noticeable delay to page load.
ie7.js (and ie9.js)
Gives you many CSS3 selectors, min and max width, multiple classes and fixed positioning. Also can have a png fix if you like. Doesn't seem to slow things down much.
You can use the moderizer script to bridge the gap for html markup.
I wouldn't really worry about CSS3 working or not in IE. If you have a supported browser you get an enhanced user experience and if you don't you would just get a normal one.
Related
Is there any problem If i use position:absolue property in HTML 5 ?
position:absolute;left:somepx;top:somepx;
Will it work on all browsers or does the syntax go upside down ? Im using the
<!doctype HTML>
and developing the html using images and with some text, Just placing them in a good looking way using the position:absolute.And im developing using my internet explorer probably its version 7 I think so.But im worried will it work on other browsers like mozilla and google chrome with no error.Will it remain the same way on all browsers? becuase the stackoveflow or google any webpage looks in the same way in all browsers.I just wanted to know what standards they follow that makes them look same on every browser.
Please just let me know is there any harm or pitfall using the position:absolute.Thank you in advance
It seems you make some mistakes when you build your websites.
using absolute positioning where you shouldn't. It is not appropriate to use position: absolute to make a complex layout. Consider looking for some tutorials to learn how to build a layout using especially float, clear, margin and padding CSS properties. Use absolute positioning only where it is explicitly required.
using non standards-compliant browser during website development. IE7 is quite old browser with buggy support for web technologies. This may cause that your website will display fine only in IE7 and messy in every other browser. What you have to do is to develop website in standards-compliant browser (no matter what browser, just make sure you use the latest version available) and then check the website in older browsers (and possibly fix bugs that appear). Don't forget to check the website in all browsers used by your visitors. Compatibility tables like those at QuirksMode are often useful.
Back to original question, browsers don't distinguish between versions of HTML (there is just standards and quirks mode, but you don't need to care about them because you're using doctype that triggers standards mode in all browsers); so there's nothing more to be aware of. Absolute positioning should (and in most cases, will) work well in IE8+ and all widely used versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. Once again, you're supposed to test your website in all widely used browsers; you'll discover possible browser bugs and incompatibilites then.
Another interesting thing to look at is this:
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/HTML5/PositionedFloats/Default.html
It may very well be available soon and will probably be a lot better for what you want. For now, do not JUST use Position:absolute, as people have said, it is a really bad way of positioning things and should only be used under very specific circumstances.
Well it has nothing to do with HTML5, it is basic positioning.
And it is not a straightforward process to get your site to display the same in all browsers, you should take a look at resetting style sheets or just test your site in a lot of browsers.
Especially older browsers have a way of changing your design.
absolute positioning is part of css3. html5 is just a combination of javascript+html+css
with unique features. so.it should work with all the browsers. but how all the browser will display, you need to chek it in chrome,mozila,safari,opera...etc in recent versions.
browser compatibility may be issue some time.so,don't worry ,it's better to chek and fix the variations.
Are there any good notes and guidelines that one should think about when developing sites that must support Internet Explorer 6?
I'm not looking for explanations of the abundance of bugs that we have all learned by now. I need some general informations on, e.g., elements that one should prefer for certain tasks, things that simply does not work in IE6, CSS tips, etc.
here are the biggies i can think of right now:
No Alpha Transparent PNG Support
No Hover States except for the <a > tag
CSS floats behaving unexpectedly.
Can't use max/min width/height.
The Box-model conflict (padding is not added to the width of elements).
sometimes doubles margins.
IE6 doesn't support position: fixed.
...and i'm starting to get depressed so i'll stop here.
I'm fortunate in that I don't have to support IE6 any more. However it is a recent memory, so you have my sympathies.
Go to Quirksmode.org. This is an excellent resource for finding out what features various browsers support. (seeing all the red in the IE6 column will depress you though!)
If you plan to do any scripting at all, use jQuery rather than trying to work with plain Javascript: jQuery makes considerable efforts to be cross-browser compatible, even in IE6. It isn't 100%, but it makes a pretty good go at it, and give you features that would otherwise be completely impossible in IE6.
The following tools will make your life easier:
Dean Edwards' ie7.js - a JS library aimed at making IE6 more compatible with standards (he's also written "ie8.js" and "ie9.js" which extend the original ie7.js to add more features missing in various versions of IE)
Modernizr - a JS/CSS library aimed at helping you work around incompatibilities in old browsers.
IEPNGHack - allows you to use PNG graphics with transparency in IE6.
Whatever:Hover - allows you to use the :hover CSS style with any element type (IE6 normally only allows :hover for <a> tags).
CSS3Pie - a library aimed at giving IE6/7/8 some modern CSS3 features, including border radius.
There's probably more, but that should give you a start.
One thing to make clear to your employer though is that as long as they insist on using or supporting IE6, you will be unable to produce a modern feature-rich web site. There are limits to how good you'll be able to make it, even with all those hacks. Plus it'll be slow: IE6 is painfully slow at the best of times, and all those hacks will only make it slower.
Best of luck.
While simply saying "Don't Support IE6!" might sound real nice and easy to those who do not have to deal with reality, it remains a fact that many web developers/designers simply have no control whatsoever over that decision.
With that said, obviously the ideal would be "don't support ie6".
If you must support it, how much you have to support it depends on why you must; Is it because your web app is for a company which has many IE6 installations that it knows it won't be upgrading any time soon at all, or is it just for a client who wants to maintain 'support' for every possible user out there? Or is it something in between?
Generally speaking, I aim for "functional, non-totally-ugly, but certainly not pixel-perfect" appearance on IE6. I use IETester to check all versions of IE (differences abound between IE7 and IE8, for instance), so I include IE6 too, and just worry about making things look mostly functional for them.
For my clients, that has been sufficient. A couple have asked about IE6 support, and I have been able to show them that 1) the set of general users on the Internet who still use it is relatively small and 2) those users probably see so many glitches everywhere on the web anyway, they probably do not notice them anymore. I know that #2 probably sounds extremely dismissive, but I have plenty of anecdotal evidence that backs it up.
The basic idea comes down to; how much time will you really spend tweaking a site to make it perfect for an old, long-since-unsupported browser which use keeps going down more each day, when you could just make it acceptably functional, and then devote the rest of your time to more modern browsers.
But again, the extent to which you can take that route depends on how important IE6 support is to those who employ you, and why it is that important to them.
but anyway, IETester is a definite recommendation for testing it:
http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage
Poor you having to support IE6, we've all been there I guess...
Unfortunately I cannot point you to some general guidelines, besides the KISS principle (keep it simple stupid). Just stick to CSS 2.1 and don't use any fancy new technologies such as HTML5. Also don't even think of using any kind of special CSS selectors like blabla > blabla.
Let me point you to some sites which might help you in your endeavor:
CSS contents and browser compability (good overview of what to do and not to do with CSS)
ie6fixer (you actually WANT to use opacity, transparent png's? this tool will help you)
universal-ie6-css (good starting point for your custom css)
Ultimate IE6 Cheatsheet: How To Fix 25+ Internet Explorer 6 Bugs (fixing the shortcomings the manual way)
For testing I recommend setting up a small virtual machine (I'd suggest using windows xp) with IE6 running. Testing tools like IETester may use the engine of the particular browser, but I have had differences between a full blown IE6 and the IETester tools - oh also there is instant virtualization with Spoon.net browser sandboxes (they had to remove IE, because MS said so...).
I have just started web development after a few years. Mostly in the past I would specify a style-sheet dedicated to IE6. Now, Chrome and Safari seem to be rendering elements better, over FireFox.
What is standard procedure for external style-sheets these days? IE6 (STILL?) - IE8? FF even?
It would be greatly appreciated if anyone has advice specifically catered to marketplace development, ie XHTML / Wordpress development.
There is no specified number of stylesheets. Usually it is one for IE and one for rest of the browsers. Note that there exist solutions such as ie7.js or CSS3 Pie to make IE behave like standard-compliant browser.
I personally use 2 stylesheets. One core one, and one for IE6.
Most of the modern browsers simply ignore anything that they don't support, and dont have quite the sheer number of behaviours that require hacks.
Given that a stylesheet isn't required at all, the answer is none. I would still say you need only 1 though. (If you've created your css properly and used a proper doctype). Technically you shouldn't need to have browser specific styles at all. And for the few times you might, you can use Star Hacks for IE...
I think question you're asking relates back to the much bigger topic of how best to handle cross-browser issues.
It's a wide and varied topic, but to help you with you're specific question about CSS branching (forking)... you may be interested in the following article from "A List Apart"
"Stop Forking with CSS3" http://www.alistapart.com/articles/stop-forking-with-css3/
Cheers.
I'd like to start using HTML5's basic features, but at the same time, keep my code backwards compatible with older browsers (graceful degradation). For instance, I'd like to use the cool CSS3 properties for making rounded corners. Is there any available tutorial for writing gracefully degradable HTML5 ?
Additionally, what browsers should I support so that my app. is functional for at least 95% of visitors? What are the ways to test those browsers painlessly ?
When talking about HTML5 or CSS3, you should head over to:
When can I use...
As can be seen, we are still far far away from using that.
Also, since old versions of the browsers won't support HTML5 or CSS3, however, you can do what is known as:
Progressive Enhancement and Graceful Degradation
Here are some resources also:
Gallery of HTML5 Sites (You can learn and get the idea from them)
Create modern Web sites using HTML5 and CSS3
Browsers that, collectively, cover 95% of the world: Firefox, Chrome, IE6/7/8.
The best way to test them is to install them on your computer.
You want to use html tags and css compatible with mobile browsers.
For anything CSS3 wrap it in conditional javascript. I always make sure the device width is atleast 240px, then anything below that is the old, crappy, mobile look.
You can use a small mobile boilerplate for CSS, to reset the basic tags you use (make them look them same in different browsers). As with any boilerplate, you should look at the css to see if it's WAY overkill.
For a comprehensive guide check out the W3 Mobile CSS2 guidelines: http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/WD-css-mobile-20001013
Another good resource is this compatibility table: http://www.quirksmode.org/m/css.html
Graceful Degradation is all about making compromises -- if you could do everything in the lower version, you probably would. To pick on the example of rounded corners you cite, it may acceptable to you (or your client) to live without them, where there don't exist renderer specific CSS extensions to support them (this is how http://www.ipswich-angle.com/ handles it, for example, I believe). Other options involving images are there, but it is largely dependant on what compromises you and your client are willing to make.
A service like browsershots.org is quite useful to check how your site renders on different browsers and operating systems. You have to wait in a queue for a while but it's worth doing that.
I was going to make this a comment, but then I got carried away..
w3schools has suggestions for using semantic web elements on your site. It suggests using a Javascript library called html5shiv.js to add styling support to IE8 and below so you can find javascript files which emulate specific functionality built into HTML5 like JSON2.js and Webforms2.js.
Finally this article gives a full example of emulating a HTML5 form with many of the new attributes/functionality.
As for building the site, I'd recommend building a HTML4 site first using semantic elements freely (with html5shiv) and testing with IE7. Then as you build parts of the site that require new features, research a Javascript file that will provide older browsers with the same functionality, e.g: when it's time to add your first rounded corner or gradient maybe add CSS3Pie. Always remember as well that your box-model; border-radius and gradients are supported in webkit as well as mozilla's API so many css3 attributes you'll need to add 3 times:
border-radius: 3px;
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
Unfortunately I don't have a good resource for how the webkit/mozilla APIs compare with HTML5 functionality.
The only functionality I've struggled to find is support for CSS3 selectors in older browsers, often you can get away with this, I mean if you're not gonna upgrade your browser IMHO you can live with few double-thickness borders or missing alternate row styling in tables.
Maybe one day there will be a site that you can upload your code to that will tell you things like "chrome 20.xyz doesn't support rounded corners, add -webkit-border-radius to add support" but until then adding backwards compatibility after the fact will be near-impossible for complex sites.
My <marquee> tag is working perfectly in ie6 and ie7, but in ie8 it only shows first item.
How can I fix this?
Thanks in advance.
The marquee element is deprecated. The W3C recommends using <em> and <strong> as alternatives. If you need to mimic the behavior of the marquee, JavaScript has tools for doing that. This discussion has a working JavaScript example.
As much as it pains me to link this:
http://remysharp.com/demo/marquee.html
A jquery based marquee which will work across browsers.
As much as I loathe the element and the vast majority of its use-cases, CSS3 seems to have brought it back:
CSS Play: CSS 3 Marquee.
CSS3.info: CSS3 Marquee Module.
From what I understand Marquee is deprecated, and IE8 might be the version of IE that Microsoft decided to completely leave out support for that tag. Even if you do find a way to get it to work, I would suggest using another method to get the text to scroll (if that is what is needed) becuase you will probably have the same problem in the next version if IE.
EDIT:
You can try java script...after a quick search I found this site that looks like it will generate the code for you. Also, since it's javascript it should now also work on Firefox, Chrome, etc.
http://rumkin.com/tools/marquee/
I really feel the scroller mechanism is pre-Web 2.0. If your client wants it, well you may not have a lot of options but I would really try and do some kind of demo to highlight that there are better ways and it would not cause any instability to the site if implemented correctly.
I know many clients are cautious, but in my experience if you can show them a better alternative which is as stable or even more stable and at a low cost (time and money) then they are willing to accept the new way more often than not.