Complete Guide On Creating Browser Compatible HTML And CSS
How many times have you encountered a situation where a particular web-page or complete website renders differently on different browsers? The situation becomes more complicated when the test is performed on browsers across different platforms & devices (Operating System – Linux, Windows, Android, iOS, etc. Device Types – Desktops, Mobiles, Tablets, etc.). Hence, testing your website & web applications across various combinations of browsers, platforms, and devices is very critical for your business as any inconsistency in the functionality could create a negative impression on user-experience and the business. The process of testing across different combinations is termed as ‘Cross-Browser Compatibility Test.
What Is Cross-Browser Testing?
Cross-Browser testing is a process of verifying the functionality of a website or web application across a different combination of browsers, in order to maintain ‘consistency’ in the functionality & quality.
Cross-Browser testing is applicable for customer-facing websites and web applications. In some cases, it is also applicable for sites that are used internally in an organization e.g. intranet-based site that has email, ERP, and other common functionalities that are widely used in many organizations. Some developers limit the access to their web product, by permitting web-browsers through a user-agent. User-agent are responsible for retrieving, rendering, and facilitating the end user interaction with the web content.
Why Cross Browser Testing Is Imperative?
- If you are building a global product i.e. consumers of your product also belong to emerging economies where there is still lower penetration of smartphones, there is a possibility that they might be using devices with an outdated version of the browser on the phone/tablet. Even on desktops, many users might be using older version of their favorite browser and these browsers may not support latest CSS, HTML5, JavaScript features. This could result in breakage of an important functionality on your website since these are preliminary languages used in web development.
- There are a huge number of phones, tablets, and smart TVs from different OEMs and each cater to different customer segments. They would have different RAM, ROM configurations, and variable screen sizes. Your website/web app on a low-end smartphone should accommodate all these requirements in order to keep up with its usability factor.
- As per a report from WHO, there are an increasing number of users who use assistive technologies to access the web. You need to ‘enable’ this user segment in case they are also the intended users of your web product.
However, there lies a huge underlying challenge in testing your website/web app on a combination of different browsers and platforms. Hence, there should be a fallback mechanism for users who do not have latest browsers so that they can still access the sub-functionalities/sub-features if the ‘core functionalities’ are accessible. While developing the product, you can detect the ‘browser type’ by checking the ‘user agent’ and based on the (browser type + browser version), come up with ‘stripped down features’ to accommodate the older version of the browser.
As a developer, it seems impossible to have your website/web app ‘fully functional’ across all the browsers as there would certainly be a ‘category of miniscule number of users’ who might be using a browser from a relatively new company (having less market share) or using a very old version of a popular browser. Hence, you need to ensure that your product is functional on ‘an acceptable number of web browsers’ and decide ‘the acceptable number of browsers’ after having discussion with your product, development, and test teams.
Cross-Browser Testing Cycle
‘Testing’ is a very important phase as fewer bugs in the end-product results to a better user experience. Similar to ‘unit test plan’, you need to formulate a ‘test plan’ to carry out the cross-browser testing of your product based on the scale and complexity of the product. You cannot develop all the product functionalities for one particular browser family and then start tuning your source code to make it adaptable for other ‘acceptable browsers’. Also, the overall complexity would increase if the overall scale of the product (either in terms of Lines per Code – LOC or number of users) is very large as you might end up spending a significant amount of time in code navigation.
It is not recommended to perform cross-browser testing at the end of the project, but it should be performed intermittently. Similar to normal development process, you have to follow an iterative ‘development->test->fix’ cycle even for cross-browser testing.
Cross-browser issues could occur due to number of reasons, but majority of the issues are caused due to problems caused by HTML/HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. In subsequent sections, we look into cross-browser compatibility issues in more detail and what can be done to avoid them.
Finding And Fixing Cross-Browser Compatibility Issues In CSS And HTML
Every developer has his/her own choice of preferable IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and other tools used for development & testing. Due to this, the code alignment & design on one IDE could differ from other IDEs. If there is a newbie web-developer in the team who is using an IDE which does not do ‘error checking’ there is a probability that you might come across missing semicolons (;) and other syntax-errors. Hence, a complete code-walkthrough has to be done so that such errors are caught in the first review.
Based on your target customer segment, you should perform testing of the important feature set on ‘popular’ modern browsers (Chrome, Firefox, etc.) & platforms (Desktop, Mobile – Android, iOS, etc.) before targeting cross-browser issues. As mentioned earlier, many bugs in CSS and HTML code can be avoided if your code is well-aligned, comments have been inserted at the right places, braces have been matched, etc. Before we look at code validators, we need to first understand DOCTYPE in HTML as it plays an important role in ensuring that the browser renders the content correctly. DOCTYPE in HTML is an instruction given to the web browser about the version of HTML used for the page, in order to render the web content appropriately. In HTML 4.01, declaration refers to DTD (Document Type Definition) as that version of HTML is based on SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). An example of Continue Reading......
Author name: Harshit Paul.