What are the topics we should pay attention while designing web site for Internet Explorer 8? Is there any new standard,we should obey for best appearance?
You should never design a site for a browser, you should design sites using the subset of css/javascript that is supported by everyone.
Granted, if by design for ie8 you mean you will not be supporting 7 or 6, that subset gets alot bigger.
With IE8, Microsoft is planning to bring compliance with W3.org web standards. http://www.w3.org/
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/IE-8-On-the-Path-to-Web-Standards-Compliance-ACID-2-Test-Pass-Complete/
So, make sure your site is valid according to web standards. You can validate your site by going to http://jigsaw.w3.org/
Related
I was wondering this while I was learning some front-end web development. But does anyone understand what the point of the menu tag is for html if the tag is not supported in all major browsers? When I was inspecting some web page I saw its use then looked on the w3schools website for more info about it, and it states that there its not supported in any browsers.
In this specific case:
The menu element was introduced in HTML 3.2, did not see wide take up from browser authors, was deprecated in HTML 4 and removed in HTML 5.
It has no place on the modern web.
In more general terms:
Most features of web standards have limited support from browsers when they are first introduced. Often their effects can be replicated in browsers that do not support them using CSS and/or JavaScript.
Sometimes take up of a feature is so poor that it gets removed from the standards again (although modern approaches to writing standards mean they will tend to live in a draft state until it is clear if the support is going to be good enough).
It is up to the page author to decide when there is sufficient client support for a feature for it to be worth using, and how much effort they wish to go to in order to make it work in older browsers.
If one were to build a new Web Browser, from scratch; Which documents would they need in order to follow Standards?
Would they just use the W3C website to obtain information on how HTML and CSS should be parsed?
I apologize if this is too broad of a question, or if I am not providing enough information, but I'm not quite sure how exactly I should ask this type of question.
Building your own web browser is one thing; building a web browser along with a rendering/layout engine from scratch is another.
Rendering engines are what "execute" the HTML/CSS/Scripting code and change it to render-able content. For instance, Mozilla Firefox uses the Gecko engine, while Chrome and Safari use WebKit. Writing a decent engine isn't simple -- there are many standards to follow. There are open-source engines (like Gecko), so you don't have to write your own. But in any case, there are 2 main standards to follow:
The W3C Standards
The IETF RFC Drafts
Good luck, and I hope that helped you!
Is it safe now to develop web application with HTML 5 specifications? or should we wait longer for final standards?
I want to start developing a new project. I want it to be up to date in every aspects. should I wait more for html 5 or I can start programming based on it?
It all depends on your audience.
If most of your audience is going to be fairly hip web developers that know to use a decent browser, you are probably going to be fine using HTML5.
However, if your audience is any government institution (school, etc), business place, etc, you might not want to use it yet. My school currently runs on Internet Explorer 6/7, and one of my teacher constantly complains about that "Your browser is not supported" message at the top of Youtube. These people probably don't have any control over the browser they use, and might be a bit behind due to the IT guys.
Find your audience, and use what you are comfortable using with them.
It depends what you which features you want to implement. HTML 5 is a very broad standard covering video, dynamic bitmaps, geolocation, more semantic tags etc.
No browser has implemented all HTML5 features, all have implemented some
This will tell you most of what you need to know about and which browsers support it.
http://diveintohtml5.ep.io/
Which part were you particularly interested in? Many people want to use canvas which is the dynamic graphics tag (simulates svg in an element). Canvas works on all major browsers except IE, though support for canvas is predicted in IE9
It depends on your audience. If they have the latest browsers then you can start using parts of HTML 5. If you don't have a good understanding of your user base then you might want to use web analytics to understand the capabilities of their browsers. Developers tend to have newer browsers but corporations or schools may not. You should also do some research on HTML 5 and understand if you can get up to speed with it quickly if deployment time is a concern.
Use progressive enhancement. A lot of the HTML5 features (application cache, the custom form fields, the extra semantic tags) will do no harm in unsupported browsers (though you might need the HTML5 shiv from Remy Sharp), but give a bonus to users and spiders who can use them. Other features (video tag, database storage, web workers, geolocation) can use workarounds for compatibility with older browsers - the Modernizer library linked by Mark Pilgrim makes this very easy. If your app is usese Geodata, for example, you could use the browser-based geolocation where available and fallback to something IP-based.
I am working in creating a website and I want to check in multiple browsers for Browser Compatibility test automatically by using Automated Test Tool. Do you guys know if there is any software/tool where I can just give a link and it loads the page in multiple browsers?
I've used Browser Shots before and it's ok if you don't mind waiting for an hour or two.
I'd also recommend checking out some of the links on Delicious.
You're looking for litmus, from the people who brought you doctype, part of the League of Justice. 14-day passes to test your layouts in 24 browsers currently cost $39.
I'm a fan of XenoCode's "Spoon Browser Sandbox" myself.
You can use Selenium RC (Selenium 1) or Selenium 2 (WebDriver) for automated test. But You have to record the test using Selenium IDE on Firefox browser and writing some tests on it. Selenium supports FF, Chrome, IE, Safari and Opera.
If the website is publicly visible then there are web based services that you can use such as http://crossbrowsertesting.com/.
If your website is internal only, then you're going to struggle to find support I think. We tried to find one but all we found were services that require a publicly visible website - no good for testing pre-go-live.
Are you talking about a compatible design or compatible JS? Because AJAX functionality is difficult to test with the usual cross-browser tools.
For the latter, look at httpUnit, though I'm not sure it can simulate multiple browsers.
There's Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview, but I haven't tried it so can't comment on if it's good or not.
Their opening quote makes me laugh though, mainly because of how sucky IE6 is:
About 7 years ago, the browser wars
were over. Internet Explorer had
become the de facto standard, and for
a while, there were very few
compatibility issues in web page
design.
Check it out though, might be worthwhile. Especially if you are a .NET developer, however it might be useful to web developers in general.
Adobe has BrowserLab. It requires an Adobe account (free) and gives you Firefox 2.0 - 3.5 (WinXP, OSX), IE 6-8 (WinXP), Safari 3-4 (OSX) and Chrome 3.0 (WinXP).
If you had some social networking applications and you wanted your users to interact with them using a mobile device would you use WAP or a slimmed down version of your regular website with HTML?
My train of thought is that WAP is dead or at least starting to bleed to death because of all the mobile web browsers available (Iphone, Opera Mini). Is this a good assumption?
Also, what kind of audience considerations should you take into account when choosing what kind of mobile access you wanted to develop?
I'm ot sure about my target devices. I'm pretty sure my users will be more "modern" so we can assume Windows Mobile, iPhone, and Blackberry devices.
WAP 2.0 = XHTML Mobile Profile. I'm assuming by WAP you mean WAP 1.0 and WML. Pretty much all mobile browsers these days support XHTML MP (or some close cousin).
For best practices on mobile development, refer to the dotMobi Mobile Web Developer's Guide.
I suggest you use something like WURFL to auto-detect mobile browsers, and serve them XHTML MP with Wireless CSS. I've built a mobile front-end for an application in this way, and it works well across lots of mobile browsers (mobile ie, opera, openwave, ...).
You shoud use standard XHTML 1.0 Strict or XHTML Mobile Profile. WAP is going to die very, very soon (if it hasn´t already).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML_Mobile_Profile
Slimmed down HTML.
WAP sites are universally ugly, in my view, and with mobile browsers becoming more capable, Ajax applications are increasingly possible (and can work well with the limited bandwidth/data plans that people may have.
But if you need to support every mobile device on the planet, you may have to do something with WAP anyway.
What are your target devices? Everything, modern-ish phones, smartphones only....?
Having developed a few mobile applications I would say that the majority of clients support HTML. It is of course safe to serve these clients a slimmed down version of HTML in order to design your application for the common denominator. However, there is still a significant number of clients which only accept WML as their content type and thus HTML cannot satisfy all your users.
If you read the HTTP_ACCEPT header you can determine what the client is able to understand. In my experience it is safer to serve HTML whenever you can and fall back on WML when you have to.
The bottom line is that if you are reluctant to supporting two versions of your site, use slimmed down HTML (preferably XHTML). If you can support WAP in addition to HTML it makes a nice fallback for the clients which do not understand HTML.
Do remember that WAP has strengths of it's own that normal HTTP sites browsed from mobile handsets do not posess.
A major one is that you can get access to WAP billing, where you can charge small amounts of money from customers that may not have credit cards available.
Also you can use the MSISDN (mobile phone number) to uniquely identify and track visitors to you WAP site.