IE's Compatibility w/w3c ?

okiiyama · May 13, 2005

Maybe this question is laffable, but here goes:

In order to make every web user out there happy who may traverse upon my site, will I be needing to have multiple style sheets for each of the different browsers, or is there enough tags and what-not that are supported across browsers such that one style sheet is enough?

If it matters lets assume I don't need/want a print style sheet.

Hopefully this has made sense.

Thanks.

stormbind · May 13, 2005

You can specify a DTD in the first line of your page.

This is supposed to instruct the browsers in how to render elements, and that should make all browsers render to the same specified standard. In theory, this would be universal and you could even write your own DTD.

However, some DTD are ignored but some browsers! Finding a DTD which is supported by all browsers may not be possible - I honestly don't know.

In my opinion, the most widely supported DTD is:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

--Glen

Memoria mihi benigna erit qui eam perscribam

stormbind · May 13, 2005

If you check out technology related corporations such as Sun.com Apple.com Microsoft.com and so forth you may get some indication of which works. However, these same companies (suspect Microsoft) may have agendas that lead them use a DTD not supported by competitor browsers

At the end of the day, you are trying to make the best of bad situation and you may need to compromise

--Glen

Memoria mihi benigna erit qui eam perscribam

stormbind · May 13, 2005

Interestingly, Macromedia (who I would suspect to have no bias) have the longest declaration I have seen:

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xhtml1-20000126/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">[/URL]
<html xmlns="[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">[/URL]

Technically, the inclusion of xml version/encoding makes this source closer to the W3C standards than most... but it still baffles me because, I was under the impression that, MSIE had a bug where it only pays attention to the first line! So in this case it would ignore the all-important DOCTYPE declaration.

If I am right, it just goes to show there is no winning in the war over standards

*shrug*

--Glen

Memoria mihi benigna erit qui eam perscribam

BillyRayPreachersSon · May 14, 2005

will I be needing to have multiple style sheets for each of the different browsers, or is there enough tags and what-not that are supported across browsers such that one style sheet is enough?

It depends on what you want to achieve with your CSS. However, it is most likely that you will not need a per-browser style-sheet

(usual proviso applies about the answer only being as good as the information we're given about what you actually want to achieve - in this case, none)

Hope this helps,
Dan

[tt]D'ya think I got where I am today because I dress like Peter Pan here?[/tt]
[banghead]

Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

IE's Compatibility w/w3c ?

okiiyama

IS-IT--Management

stormbind

Technical User

stormbind

Technical User

stormbind

Technical User

BillyRayPreachersSon

Programmer

Similar threads

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor