As a web developer, you want your website to look good and function well on different browsers and devices. But how do you ensure cross-browser compatibility and responsiveness in your web design? Here are some tips and best practices to help you achieve this goal.
Web standards are guidelines and specifications that define how web technologies should work. They are developed by organizations like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). By following web standards, you can make your website more accessible, reliable, and consistent across browsers. For example, you should use valid HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code that conforms to the latest standards. You can use tools like the W3C Markup Validation Service and the W3C CSS Validation Service to check your code for errors and warnings.
All browsers are not following the same standards, specially the older browsers are also adopting older standards so it's also important to maximise cross-browser compatibility. I usually use browser testing tools like BrowserStack, feature detection libraries such as Modernizr, polyfills, and CSS resets to ensure maximum cross-browser compatibility.
You can't assume that your website will look and behave the same on every browser and device. Different browsers may have different features, bugs, and quirks that affect how they render your website. Devices may have different screen sizes, resolutions, and orientations that affect how your website fits and adapts to them. Always test your website on various browsers and devices to identify and fix any issues that may arise. You can use tools like BrowserStack, CrossBrowserTesting, and LambdaTest to simulate different browsers and devices online. And tools like Chrome DevTools, Firefox Developer Tools, and Safari Web Inspector will help you inspect and debug your website on different browsers.
Progressive enhancement and graceful degradation are two complementary strategies that help you make your website work on different browsers and devices. Progressive enhancement means that you start with a basic version of your website that works on all browsers and devices, and then add more features and enhancements for browsers and devices that support them. Graceful degradation means that you start with a full-featured version of your website that works on modern browsers and devices, and then provide fallbacks and alternatives for browsers and devices that don't support them. For example, you can use feature detection to check if a browser supports a certain feature, and then use polyfills, shims, or fallbacks to provide a similar or alternative functionality if it doesn't.
Progressive enhancement over graceful degradation is preferred. When you delve into the world of graceful degradation what might be simple and straight forward can easily become a mess over time with change. It should always be asked the true value of such features that are not widely supported.
Responsive web design is a technique that allows you to create websites that adapt to different screen sizes, resolutions, and orientations. It uses flexible layouts, media queries, and fluid images to make your website responsive. Flexible layouts use relative units like percentages, ems, or rems to define the width and height of elements, instead of fixed units like pixels or points. Media queries allow you to apply different styles based on the characteristics of the device or the viewport, such as the width, height, orientation, or resolution. Fluid images use the max-width property to scale the images proportionally to the width of the container, instead of using fixed dimensions. For example, you can use the following media query to apply a different style for devices with a width of 600px or less:
@media (max-width: 600px) {
/* Your style rules for small devices */
}
If you are coding without responsive design as a mandatory requirement now, you are being left behind. It is best to start with smaller screen sizes and work your way up. Many sites offer responsive design barely, as in just enough to technically pass the bar but leave much to be desired.
Web fonts and icons are resources that you can use to enhance the appearance and usability of your website. Web fonts are fonts that you can embed in your website using the @font-face rule or a service like Google Fonts or Adobe Fonts. Web fonts allow you to use custom fonts that may not be available on the user's device, and make your website more consistent and attractive across browsers and devices. Icons are graphical symbols that you can use to represent actions, concepts, or features on your website. They can be images, fonts, or SVGs. Icons can help you save space, improve readability, and convey meaning on your website. You can use Font Awesome or Bootstrap Icons to add icons to your website using web fonts or SVGs.
Your website performance is crucial for cross-browser compatibility and responsiveness. A fast and smooth website can improve user experience, engagement, and retention. A slow and laggy website can frustrate users, increase bounce rate, and affect SEO. Optimize your website performance by using techniques like minification, compression, caching, lazy loading, and image optimization. Minification means removing unnecessary characters like whitespace, comments, and semicolons from your code to reduce its size. Compression means using algorithms like gzip or brotli to reduce the size of your files before sending them to the browser. Caching means storing frequently used files on the browser or the server to reduce the number of requests and downloads. Lazy loading means loading files only when they are needed or visible on the screen, instead of loading them all at once. Image optimization means using appropriate formats, sizes, and quality settings for your images to reduce their size and improve their display.
Most of these are handled by frameworks like NextJS, you just have to be more aware of what tags are you using, like <Image /> tag from next js or default HTML <img /> tag, which leads to a huge performance difference.
A couple other practices to improve performance are to only serve the minimum data for the page. This can be tricky to navigate depending on your technology as there are often times baked in data that is processed by default. The second is to reduce the total resources requests issued. With so many frameworks and libraries in use this can also become a problem when you are default loading these resources when they are largely not used or not required for some pages in particular.