I am learning how to program and my goal is to build a simple functional prototype…I’m at the very beginning.
I am not concerned with the visual design at this stage, other than as it relates to being able to demonstrate the functionality.
My question is: do I need to worry about ironing out cross-browser bugs in the HTML/CSS, or can I do development on a single browser? (Perhaps a better way of asking this is does the back-end programming have any effect on which browser is displaying it).
If you are at the very beginning and only want a functional prototype, do not worry about cross browser HTML/CSS. In fact forget the CSS altogether and focus on printing just standard HTML. Since the visual design will change, focus on the content, styles can always be applied and switched later.
If you need Javascript/AJAX stuff I would recommend using a library like JQuery that has already solved many cross browser problems for you.
The back-end stuff “Perl, PHP, Python, etc” shouldn’t care about the browser as it is simply printing text for the browser to render as it will.