I just got into web development 2 months ago for a personal project. I am know facing an issue for which I would appreciate some advice of experienced people. In my project, I am using a lot css3 "effects": border-radius, box-shadows, gradients,etc. The thing is, I am now confronted to cross-browser issues. So my question is simple. Is it better to apply css hacks or use images (psd slicing)? Thank you in advance for your replies. Cheers. Marc.
I think you want to do a combination of both. PSD slicing will make it harder to update and maintain, whereas hacks don't usually get you what you want. Check out http://css3pie.com/ to see how you can incorporate most of the CSS3 techniques with IE. It's a great resource and I use it every day. It only works well for some items though, like drop shadow doesn't work well with PIE. For something like that you might do a background image of a drop shadow.
If you use some psd slicing make sure that the people that are visiting your website will not have any issues with slow loading. Truth be told, lots of people have a decent internet connection now so having a few more psd slicing will not be a problem.
Just make sure your images are well optimised for web and that should do the trick !
There are certainly items that you can use images for, but above all else, you are better off embracing the principals of progressive enhancement and making something that is compliant with current web standards. Older browsers are slowly going away, but web standards are not.
Ensure that all visitors to the site are able to access the most important parts of the site. Parts of the site may need to gracefully degrade and hide some features that are mainly aesthetic. You can then apply appropriate fixes for those areas that could either be CSS hacks or images (for example, drop shadows and gradients).
Related
I am making a website, where when i preview it in safari. It turns out exactly as i want it to be. But when i test it out with firefox.
In my page i have a element that is aligned on the page using
Padding-left and Margin-top. Which works perfectly when i preview it in safari. But when i open the file in firefox. The element's Margin-top increases by a few pixels.
How do i code my css file so that i can have the same page for different browsers. I have tried looking on the web for a solution, but none of them so far has helped with the problem.
Reply's will be much appreciated.
As jsteinmann said, check use http://validator.w3.org/ to ensure your page validates. This will take some time to figure out if you are new, but it is an essential step.
If you are having an issue with FireFox, you are probably going to die when you look in IE. Bookmark this link! http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537512(v=vs.85).aspx
You have a lot to learn and google will help: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=introduction+to+cross+browser+testing&oq=introduction+to+cross+browser+testing&aqs=chrome.0.57.5763&sugexp=chrome,mod=12&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
In future, use stackoverflow for specific questions with code examples. You will find that you get specific answers quite quickly.
Also, don't forget to tick the answer that you find most useful, and also vote some up a level. That's why people spend the time answering your questions.
Enjoy the long road ahead :)
Specify all four margin and all four padding values explicitly. That will eliminate the diffferences in the browsers' built-in default stylesheets.
There can be several reasons why your finding your layouts aren't cross-browser compatible, so it would take a considerable amount of info of the markup and css to make any kind of determination on how to help you code a 100% W3C valid web page.
I would suggest using a css framework like blueprint or 960 for your layouts, so you have less issues in this way. It's a good way to start and maintain projects, and learn how to create layouts if you choose not to use a framework.
Also, I would suggest testing all of your projects in chrome and firefox first, then safari, simply because of the amount of users that use those two browsers compared to safari. I would also say, if it looks good in chrome, it will probably look good in safari and firefox, but it's always worth testing.
It's just that I don't really know enough about XHTML, CSS, or Javascript and I'm trying to learn. I know what to do in order to get things to work or look the way I want them to but I'm guessing my methods are not the standard best way to get the results I desire; obviously not because it's not working across all browsers.
I am hoping for someone who is willing to spend a little bit of time with me to go over the code, make recommendations and explain why what I have is not standard for coding. I have some validation errors but they mostly are all in the javascript, which I didn't even write so I honestly have no idea if they are causing trouble or how to fix them if they are.
So my website is pretty simple. I just want to have a professional page where potential employers can see my resume and contact information. When I look at my website in firefox 4 or Safari 5.0.5 everything is perfect. The image of my name and the "contact" tab images both line up with the edge of the main container div. Also the text with the arrow picture line up about 50 pixels to the right so the arrow does not overlap with my resume picture. I use absolute positioning because when I try to use anything else, it gets all messy.
The Problem I am Having: My name logo, contact image tab and "please indulge with..." arrow picture seem to be about 65 pixels off to the left when I view my website in IE8 and Firefox 3.
My website is: nicholasdexter.me
Once again, I'm sorry that this question is geared towards me but I know you all are experts and I don't know where else to go for help. Thank you for reading!
Here is my style sheet: http://nicholasdexter.me/style.css
There's a lot of bugs in older browsers (particularly Internet Explorer 6 & 7). Also, some things just aren't supported in older browsers.
The trick is either to:
- Use something called Graceful Degradation/Progressive Enhancement, in which newer techniques are used, but are used in a way that it won't matter if there's support or not for those things. For example, shadows, if no-one can see them, who cares? If they do, great. The trick is balancing that out.
- Avoid those "new" techniques altogether.
This is nothing new here, and is even a pain for professionals. Microsoft evens hates IE6 now. http://www.ie6countdown.com/ So don't beat yourself up for it. :)
There are alot of resources out there that may help you find the right solution(s) to your problems. Here's one:
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/contents.html
Oh, and feel free to ask questions again. Front-End Development (coding web stuff) is a real challenge some days! :)
I'm just wondering what is the least expensive way to use a lot of gradients in a site's design.
I feel certain that CSS will be less expensive for the browser than SVG, but I could not justify this without tests. I would suggest that you create your page with your many gradients in CSS and if (and only if) you find performance to be a problem should you try SVG or other technologies.
I would lean more towards CSS for this one. Seeing as it is CODE rather than an image.
Also, if you are leaning more towards using CSS, why not make it viewable and or workable in IE 8 and below, via CSS3pie? http://css3pie.com/
This is an interesting question. In my personal experience webkit has been faster with svg, but I could be wrong.
I created a test fiddle with css transitions and they look about the same, perhaps someone with more experience can extend the stress case:
http://jsfiddle.net/KLCEw/
Keep in mind that SVG gradients are best embedded through data-uri's so they don't create new requests to the server.
With lots of talk and bickering among developers about how IE breaks standards, is it worth supporting mozilla and webkit CSS?
Examples
-moz-border-radius
-webkit-border-radius
Of course there are many more, but I just want to know everyone's thoughts.
Thanks
For IE, we were (are?) using proprietary features in order to eliminate rendering bugs. At least, in the case of FF and WebKit, we're using them to improve the design. It's progressive enhancement in this case. No one suffers if they have no border-radius feature, but we as developers get more satisfaction for using some CSS3 features. Our designs are more pleasing and W3C gets the feedback it needs in order to improve and then approve the CSS3 draft.
Rounded corners are proposed in the W3C CSS3 working draft. The proprietary extensions in Gecko and WebKit are already likely to conform to the working draft.
Given that rounded corners are purely aesthetic, there's no disadvantage to users with browsers who do not support rounded corners.
When the standard becomes final, it's a simple matter of replacing these proprietary rules with the standardised ones.
If you define -moz-border-radius and -webkit-border-radius, make sure and define -khtml-border-radius (Konqueror), -opera-border-radius, and plain old border-radius as well (for future-proofing purposes).
We tend to use the proprietary methods followed by the CSS3 spec version for when the method becomes more widley supported.
http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-background/#the-border-radius
If necessary (which isn't often) we use JQuery + IE conditional tags to render the same for IE.
http://malsup.com/jquery/corner/
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/condcom.html
It really all depends on your target audience, we wouldn't generally use unsupported CSS on a public facing site as 89% of our users are still using IE 6/7 so it would be useless to most of them.
We currently use it on a few admin systems and some internal systems; mostly to give the design team exposure to the new techniques.
Consider your target audience, browser specs based on analytic's and how necessary it really is first.
I'd support both, IE still has a big chunk of the user space, with Firefox and others (opera, safari etc..) occupying a smaller percentage of the browser market.
using mozilla only stuff might be ok if you can control what your clients are using, by recommending it in some way (if you're writing a web app. with a fixed user base) and even then someone will still insist on using IE.
I know its a pain in the backside supporting both, but I don't think web developers have much choice in the matter :(
In the case of border-radius, I'd say use the Mozilla/Webkit syntax if you don't mind IE/Opera users having squared corners.
If you need everyone to see the same thing, it's best to stick with the old techniques for now. Similarly, any non-universal CSS (say, using #font-face to download a custom symbol font) which is going to break the site for some people should stay out.
There's no harm in implementing CSS3 features so long as they degrade gracefully. So long as rounded corners, or what have you, aren't critical to your layout there's no harm having them there for the people who are running bleeding edge web browsers.
I know from personal experience that having those properties(specifically the corner radius ones) are very much a time-saver. Now of course it would be nice if css would just implement it into itself but right now I think that those properties are very helpful. I see no reason why we shouldn't support them. Mozilla's and Safari/Chrome's engines are just trying to make life a little easier.
I don't think this is a good practice. However you'd like that the site you're working on appears the same on every browser. That's why that's not a solution. It's not professional to have different layouts on different browser.
But if you don't care about that, or your application is based on only that browser - so it's completely fine!
Looking back at Stackoverflow podcast with Litmus (Podcast 78). The podcast discussed briefly the browser incompatibilities and quirks, especially with IE6 (a claim echoed everywhere). Litmus solution is to render the page in all the different browsers and look for differences.
However, I wonder how much incompatibility can be detected by simply analyzing the html and css directly, without actually rendering it.
I'm quite a newbie in this field. But I saw many references out there ... that document the IE 6 bugs and limitation, and how to avoid them when writing new documents.
If that's the case, then can a tool be made to validate and analyze the CSS and report any potential compatibility problems with the CSS?
Are there some incompatibilities that cannot be detected (due to lack of documentation) and potential limitation of such tool (when interacting with javascript and such)?
When we were developing Browsera, we tried to go about detecting cross-browser issues by looking at CSS styling alone. The problem is, it's the interaction between elements that causes the problem, rather than a specific style.
For example, if it were always the case that setting a margin would result in a double-margin, it would be detectable. However, the double margin bug in IE only occurs when there is a float in the same direction, and only for the first element in the row.
In addition to many of the IE6 layout engine issues, a lot of issues we detect are caused by different default stylesheets of browsers. For example, default margins and font size/rendering vary widely across browsers, which is probably the number one cause of layouts that look "not quite right" when you open them in other browsers.
The page seen by an Internet Explorer user is in fact built by IE parsing html and css; so, by definition, it is possible to build a tool that, knowing IE bugs, report potential problems.
Anyway, I don't think it would be easy.
Sure it can, but that's not the point of Litmus's business.
You can analyze a site and report on all the stuff that would render differently, but that wouldn't help much. Litmus's business is not designed to let you know what stuff is incompatible, it's designed to show you how it will be rendered, so you can figure out if and where your site needs improvement.
Making a website look exactly the same across all browsers is very hard, and takes a lot of resources. Often you'll need to compromise and make sure your site still looks decent on all these browsers.
No analysis tool can tell you if your site still looks decent.