I have a very old application, written of the time of IE-5. Some of the pages in IE-11 are not rendering despite having used the meta tag with ie=5 value.
I had this similar problem for making it work with IE-10 and the meta tag seemed to be working fine there.
Please provide your inputs on this ?
Without more information about the specific features that are failing, it's hard to say what might be the problem.
A number of features supported by IE5 are no longer supported by IE11, including ActiveDesktop, CDF, VML, CSS expressions, conditional comments, binary behaviors, and others.
The IE Compatibility Cookbook is a good resource for this sort of thing; it summarizes major compatibility changes to IE over the last several versions. (There's also a page that contains links describing minor changes to the browser.)
One of the biggest changes is what happens when you load a page that does not contain a document type directive. Prior to IE10, this would enable legacy (IE5) quirks mode. Starting with IE10, it enables a standards-based quirks mode based on the HTML5 specification.
Unfortunately, there's no comprehensive list of all changes as that would be very hard to put together and maintain. (Trust me on this one.) But, this blog also has a lot of useful information.
Hope this helps...
Related
I am working on a Wordpress site (a modified 2012 theme) for a client that is rendering incorrectly in IE8. Everything looks great in IE9+, as well as current versions of Chrome, FF, Safari, etc. I have looked around at some of the suggestions posted to fix the problem but I'm not quite sure where mine begins. The whole page is considerably broken. If anyone can provide me with some clues it would be a huge help. Thanks!
My Site
Edit: I'm noticing some of my styles are not being applied, specifically to top-nav and my footer. Others appear to have most if not all styles mostly intact. I've read that media-queries are not supported in IE8, but I don't see how that could be related. I am also reading that only 31 stylesheets can be applied, but I don't believe I am using nearly that many.
I had a project a while back where I have built an intranet and was nearly finished with the strap when I realized that most of the users rely on IE8; it was a shocking experience, can tell you that. That just as a preamble, so I know what your into.
I have wasted a lot of time so to safe yours (maybe), here what I would look for and probably do:
Install IE8 if you haven't already. There's a lot of tools which can help you with that like IE Tester as well as an integration installation from Microsoft directly to switch between versions
Eradicate the current errors first before you start working on the specific IE8 issues (as #markratledge already mentioned)
If you want to have HTML5 elements working as well then I recommend the HTML5.js Enabling Script
You have definitely too many HTTP Referrers (even for modern browsers), in IE8 (especially on a slower machine) it's sometimes deadly (Your page may load fast, however the rendering time is extremely long (+/- 6-20 seconds))
Combine and minify CSS and JScripts
There are a lot of services around the net where you put in your raw data and it compiles you a minified version, or server-side like Minify for PHP5
Move most scripts to the bottom to counterfeit rendering issues in IE8
Make a unique .css only for IE8 or use hacks, if really needed in your main, however you prefer (quick'n'dirty solution though)
IE8 and the X-UA-Compatible situation
How IE8 Determines Document Mode
I'm not too sure, but I think Mootools and jQuery together may create a conflict in older IE's (assumption)
Fix your code errors, in particular the JS call above the doctype. Anything above the doctype throws IE into quirks mode
Especially IE8 will get really hard on you for little mistakes inside the code, I have even seen script-includes not working because of being positioned lower than another in the code (while any other browser doesn't really care). It will take you at least a good bunch of hours to fix/erase all those errors and to make it compatible for IE8< users.
Beware that most clients (at least from my experience) don't (want to) understand browser compatibility issues like this one (It has to work!) or if really needed then make them understand that some features may be jeopardized/incomplete in the specific browser, herein.
There's plenty more you can do, but that depends on the deadline/timespan you have.
Fix your code errors, in particular the JS call above the doctype. Anything above the doctype throws IE into quirks mode
See [Invalid] Markup Validation of delindesign.com excellence - W3C Markup Validator. Scroll down in the validation report to see line numbers and source code. Start fixing the code errors and revalidate.
So HTML 5 has been widely publicised as expected to be ready in 2022. This is a long time to wait, and the test for that readiness is that "at least two browsers to completely pass [HTML 5 test suites]"
Obviously for browsers to pass this test they have to start implementing usable HTML 5 features before that. The list of new HTML5 features supported is looking thin at the moment. But there are a couple of significant changes to existing elements such as allowing A tags to surround block level that could be very useful now.
There are sites that are using HTML 5 now, so what are the factors that will make you start, or keep you from, building sites with an HTML 5 doctype?
Myself, I'm toying with HTML5 in a couple of personal sites, but will wait a while for work sites until things like a reliable validator appear.
It helps to divide this question into several parts.
1) When should one start using the HTML5 doctype?
The HTML5 doctype causes browsers to render pages in Full Standards mode. Unless you're currently using a strict doctype, pages may display differently. So you'll need to weigh up the amount of rework required if you're converting a existing site, and you'll need to understand the difference in rendering behaviour. Secondly, the doctype will cause the w3c validator to select HTML5 as the default language to validate against. Given that HTML5 is still in draft, this means aiming at a moving target. Is validity important to you? Some features that are valid in HTML4 are not currently valid in HTML5. Should you change your markup now to remove those features, given that HTML5 may change to make those features valid again? Provided you're comfortable with this, you can start using the HTML5 doctype now.
On the other hand, on it's own, what are you gaining? If you want browsers to render in Full Standards mode, you can use a strict doctype from HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.x. Do you need HTML5 validation given that it will pass things that may not at present be handled consistently across browsers? Be aware that any HTML5 feature that currently works in browsers, works regardless of whether you use the HTML5 doctype or not.
2) When should one start using features that are currently interoperably implemented in the major browsers, but standardised for the first time in HTML5?
You can use these now, but try to make sure that your pages are properly accessible. Canvas, for example, does not provide good support for non-sighted users.
3) When should one start using features that are current implemented in some browsers, and will be standardised by HTML5?
This depends on your target users and delivery schedules. Will your users be using a browser that supports these features by the time your site goes live? What happens if they don't? Does the page fall back gracefully? Do you care if some users can't use your site?
4) When should one start using features of HTML5 that are not implemented at all yet?
Why would you want to do that? It might be reasonable for training purposes or investigating fall back behaviour, but HTML5 is still in draft form, and it's quite possible that some features will never be implemented, or will be implemented in a totally different way to that currently described, so you could waste a lot of effort.
Summarising, what matters is not so much what's in the HTML5 draft, as what is practically usable today. The draft describes a range of features, some of which have been in browsers for years, some which are new but have support or good fall back behaviour, and some which are not currently and may never be usable.
For me, I'll be holding off until I need an HTML5 feature, and I know that that feature is implemented in a consistent and stable way across the major browsers. That will probably happen some time during HTML5's Last Call phase, or possibly during the Candidate Recommendation phase.
Already have started using it for personal and client work.
For validation I use Henri Sivonen's excellent http://validator.nu/
When IE supports it. I work in the corporate world, and IE is required.
I use the doctype now! (for some projects at least)
As for the features, things like <canvas> and <video> are cool and useful now because there are often ways to make the content available for users whose browsers don't support HTML5 yet.
Semantic page structure tags like <sidebar> and the lot don't seem very urgent to me. I'll let those sit for another year or two.
I need to upgrade a ASP.NET website for IE8. it works fine in IE6, but not in IE8. I don't want to run it in any backward compatibility mode. I would like to make any code changes that are required to make it fully compliant with IE8/Firefox. what is the best and/or easiest way to do that? is it just a case of going through each of the things that are broken and fixing them one by one or is there a more efficient way to fix these issues (some kind of utility??). thanks in advance.
Well there is no tool or utility to fix cross browser compatibility issues. You can make use of firebug(firefox) and IE developer toolbar to identify the points where the website is breaking.
But the good part is that you are upgrading from IE6. I dont think there will be major hiccups or problems making the website compatible with IE8 since its much better in rendering HTML as compared to IE6.
If you have expression web, you could use SuperPreview: http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/dd565874.aspx
THis is a great tool that allows you to compare you site in different browsers.
Yes, you do have to go through each browser incompatibility bug and fix it for that browser. A bug can be fixed in 3 ways (listed in my order of preference):
Start with a very compliant browser, then look at the page in other browsers (I focus on Chrome/Safari/Firefox/IE6-7-8-9)
Use different CSS technique, that ends up rendering the same in all browsers
Use IE Conditional Comments to bring in another CSS for that browser leveraging the CSS "Cascade"
Use CSS Hacks as a last resort (usually only for Firefox or something)
But "go through each browser" can be the tricky part! There are some tools to help.
#Brian mentioned SuperPreview for Expression Web (+1), but there's also a free version of SuperPreview for Internet Explorer for those who don't have Expression Web.
You can compare different versions of IE on the same machine (hard before this product). Microsoft claims this sub-set of the Expression Web product will always be free (since they feel bad about IE6!).
IE6-7-8-9 tool is good enough for me, because I tend to focus on all versions of IE, but only the latest versions of Chrome/Safari/Firefox.
But if you must test against multiple versions of other browsers:
Expression Web SuperPreview
How to Use Multiple Browsers on a Single Machine
10 Helpful Resources for Cross Browser Testing
(Although Litmus seems to have dropped general web page support, and instead focuses on email client compatibility and campaign analytics.)
Many times when I read books related to CSS I see things like this "this will not work on some browser", "this hack will work for that browser".
Where I can all information that I need to know the hacks for working for all browsers?
thanks
I suggest Quirksmode. Very useful resource for web development.
Here is a link for the CSS page on Quirksmode:
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/contents.html
I've found the SitePoint CSS reference very helpful.
You could start with:
CSS contents and browser compatibility
And if you're interested in e-mail clients as well as browsers:
Guide to CSS support in email clients (2008)
I always found this particular comparison useful, as it shows whether or not a particular feature is supported, and how well they are supported. It may prove useful for you as well.
This document will summarize the level of support for web standards and maturing technologies in popular web browsers. It covers the Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera web browsers, with focus on the HTML, CSS, DOM, and ECMAScript technologies.
Other than that, Quirksmode is a great resource.
Position Is Everyting can be useful for finding solutions to problems (mostly related to IE6 and below). They don't have a browser comparison and they have names for bugs that may not always be intuitive, so it's not always easy to find specific incompatibilities.
The articles go into a lot of detail and usually have several possible fixes, so once you've found a rendering bug, it can be quite useful. I wouldn't recommend using all their fixes directly, since they often involve browser-specific CSS hacks. It's usually better to use conditional comments.
Short version: What is the cleanest and most maintainable technique for consistant presentation and AJAX function across all browsers used by both web developers and web developers' end-users?
IE 6, 7, 8
Firefox 2, 3
Safari
Google Chrome
Opera
Long version: I wrote a web app aimed at other web developers. I want my app to support the major web browsers (plus Google Chrome) in both presentation and AJAX behavior.
I began on Firefox/Firebug, then added conditional comments for a consistent styling under IE 6 and 7. Next, to my amazement, I discovered that jQuery does not behave identically in IE; so I changed my Javascript to be portable on FF and IE using conditionals and less pure jQuery.
Today, I started testing on Webkit and Google Chrome and discovered that, not only are the styles inconsistant with both FF and IE, but Javascript is not executing at all, probably due to a syntax or parse error. I expected some CSS work, but now I have more Javascript debugging to do! At this point, I want to step back and think before writing piles of special cases for all situations.
I am not looking for a silver bullet, just best practices to keep things as understandable and maintainable as possible. I prefer if this works with no server-side intelligence; however if there is a advantage to, for example, check the user-agent and then return different files to different browsers, that is fine if the total comprehensibility and maintainability of the web app is lower. Thank you all very much!
I am in a similar situation, working on a web app that is targeted at IT professionals, and required to support the same set of browsers, minus Opera.
Some general things I've learned so far:
Test often, in as many of your target browsers as you can. Make sure you have time for this in your development schedule.
Toolkits can get you part of the way to cross-browser support, but will eventually miss something on some browser. Plan some time for debugging and researching fixes for specific browsers.
If you need something that's not in a toolkit and can't find a free code snippet, invest some time to write utility functions that encapsulate the browser-dependent behavior.
Educate yourself about known browser bugs, so that you can steer your implementation around them.
A few more-specific things I've learned:
Use conditional code based on the user-agent only as a last resort, because different generations of the "same" browser may have different features. Instead, test for standards-compliant behavior first — e.g., if(node.addEventListener)..., then common non-standard functions — e.g., if(window.attachEvent)..., and then, if you must, look at the user-agent for a specific browser type & version number.
Knowing when the DOM is 'ready' for script access is different in just about every browser. A good toolkit will abstract this for you.
Event handlers are different in just about every browser. A good toolkit will abstract this for you.
Creating DOM elements, particularly form controls or elements with attributes, can be tricky with document.createElement and element.setAttribute. While not standard (and kinda yucky), using node.innerHTML with strings that contain bits of HTML seems to be more reliable across browser types. I have yet to find a toolkit that will let you use element.setAttribute to add a 'name' to a form element in IE.
CSS differences (and bugs) are just as important as JS differences.
The 'core' Javascript features (String, Date, RegExp, Array functions) seem to be pretty reliable and consistent across browsers, especially relative to the DOM/CSS/Window functions. There's some small joy in the fact that the language isn't entirely different on every platform. :-)
I haven't really run into any Chrome-specific JS bugs, but it's always one of the first browsers I test.
HTH
Chrome is actually a little different to Safari, it uses a completely different javascript implementation and problems have been reported with both prototype and jquery. I wouldn't worry about it too much for now, it's still an early beta version of the browser and such inconsistencies will probably be treated as bugs. Here's the bug report.
One "silver bullet" you may consider turning to is Google Web Toolkit (GWT).
I believe it supports all the browsers you are interested in, and gives you the ability to code your UI in a Java-compatible IDE such as Eclipse. The advantage of this is you can use IDE tools for code completion and compile-time error checking, which greatly improves development on large-scale UI projects.
If you use GWT UI components, it will hide a lot of browser-specific nastiness from having to be dealt with, but when you compile, will create a compact, deploy file for each browser platform. This way you never download any IE-specific code if you are viewing the app in Firefox. You will also have a client-side stub generated which will load the appropriate compiled bundle of JS. To sweeten the deal, these files are cacheable, so perceived performance is generally improved for returning visitors.
The landscape has evolved considerably to accommodate cross-browser development. jQuery, Prototype and other frameworks exist for cross-browser Javascript. CSS resets are good for starting on a common blank canvas for all browsers. BluePrint and 960 are both CSS frameworks to help with layouts using CSS grid layouts techniques that seems to be getting very popular these days.
As for other CSS quirks across the different browsers, there is no holy grail here and the only option is to test you website across different browsers and use this awesome resource and definitely join a mailing list to save up soem time.
If you are working on high volume production site then you can use a service like browsercam.com in the end game to ensure the site doesn't break horribly in some browser.
Lastly, don't try to make the site look the same in every browser. Your primary design should target IE/FF and you should be okay with reasonable compromises on others. Use the graded browser chart to narrow in on browser support.
As for best practices, starting using wireframes on blank paper or a service like Balsamiq mockups. I am still surprised how many developers start with an editor instead of a wireframe but then again I only switched a year back before realizing how big a time saver it is. Have clean seperation of layout (HTML), presentation (CSS) and behaviors (Javascript). There should be no styling elements in HTML, no presenation in Javascript (use .addClass('highlight') instead of .css({'background-color': 'red'});).
If you are not familiar with any of the bold terms in this post, Googling them should be fruitful for your web development career and productivity.
If you're starting from a base reset or framework and have accounted for IE and it's still all freaky, you may want to recheck the following:
Everything validates? CSS and HTML?
Any broken links to an included file (js, css, etc?). In Chrome/Safari, if your stylesheet link is busted, all of your links might end up red. (something to do with the default 404 styling I think)
Any odd requirements of your js plugins that you might be using? (does the css file have to come before the js file, like with jquery.thickbox?)
For UI, check out Ext.
It's great as a standalone library, though it can also be used with jQuery, YUI, Prototype and GWT.
Samples: http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/samples.html
I've found four things helpful in developing JavaScript applications:
Feature detection
Libraries
Iterative Development using Virtualization
JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Douglas Crockford & John Resig
Feature Detection
Use reflection to ask if the browser supports the desired feature. If you want to know what event handling a browser supports, you can if(el.addEventHandler) for W3C compliance, if(el.attachEvent) for the IE-type, and finally fall back on el.['onSomeEvent'].
ONE BIG BUT!
Browsers sometimes lie about what features they support. I can't remember, but I ran into an issues where Firefox implemented a DOM feature, but would return false if you tested for that feature!
Libraries
Since you're already working with jQuery, I'll save the explanation. But if you're running into problems you may want to consider YUI for it's wonderful cross-browser compatibility. They even work together.
Iterative Development with Virtualization
Perhaps my best advice: Run all your test environment's at once. Get a Linux distro, Compiz Fusion and a bunch of RAM. Download a copy of either VMWare's VMWare Server or Sun's Virtual Box and install a few operating systems. Get images for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X.
The basic idea is this: Compiz Fusion gives you 4 Desktops mapped onto a Cube. 1 of these desktops is your Linux computer, the next your Virtutual Windows XP box, the one after that Vista, the last Mac OS X. After writing some code, you alt-tab into virtual computer and check out your work. Plus it looks awesome.
JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Douglas Crockford & John Resig
These three sources provide most of my information for JavaScript development. The Definitive guide is perhaps the best reference book for JavaScript.
Douglas Crockford is a JavaScript guru (I hate the word) at Yahoo. Lookup his series "Douglas Crockford Theory of the DOM", "Douglas Crockford Advanced JavaScript", "Douglas Crockford Theory of the Dom", and ""Douglas Crockford The Good Parts" on Yahoo! Videos.
John Resig (as you know) wrote jQuery. His website at ejohn.org contains a wealth of JavaScript information, and if you dig around on Google you'll find he's given a number of presentations on defensive JavaScript techniques.
... Good luck!
Just so you've got one less browser to worry about, Chrome uses the same rendering engine as Safari. So if it works in Safari, it should work exactly the same in Chrome.
See this post on Matt Cutts' blog.
Google Chrome uses WebKit for rendering, which is the same rendering engine as Apple’s Safari browser, so if your site is compatible with Safari it should work great in Chrome.
Update: Looks like this is now out-dated info. Please see Vox's comment on this answer.
If your very top priority is exactly consistent presentation on all the browsers listed with no disparities, you should probably be looking at AS3 and Flex.
Personally, I use Mootools as a simple lightweight javascript framework. It is simple to use and supports all the browsers above (except Chrome, but that seems to work too as far as I can tell).
Also, to ensure consistency across the browsers, I get a feature/style/behaviour/etc. to work in one browser first (usually Firefox 3 with firebug), then immediately check to make sure it works in all the other browsers (leaving IE6 for last). If it doesn't, I inveset the time to fix it right away, because otherwise I know I won't have time later (in my experience, getting things to work cross-browser takes about 50% of my dev. time ;-) )
Validating your javascript with a "good parts" + browser on JsLint.com makes it less likely to have JavaScripts behaving differently in FF, Safari etc.
Otherwise - using standards and validating your code as well as building on existing techniques like jQuery should make your site behave the same in all browsers except IE - and there's no magic recipe for IE - it's just bugs everywhere...