Question

With different browsers choosing to render CSS in their own preferred way , whats the point of having a standard?

Simple stuff like creating a fluid 3 column layout that works across all browsers can be an experience in frustration. How do you deal with this or make cross-browser compatible development not so painful?

Answer 1

As always, there’s a reason behind all this.

The standard is not broken (a standard can’t be broken), just that some browsers like IE don’t adhere to it completely.

This is mainly because IE was developed before any standard was created and in that time it was the best browser around, with almost zero competitors (I read that netscape was the other option and that it was much worse than IE).

Then people realized that a standard was needed, and they created it obviously not including any of IE proprietary code and features. IE was forced to choose backwards compatibility with it’s previous versions, or to adhere to this new ‘standard’, they absolutely ruled the browser market so the choice was obvious.

With new versions IE tried to be more and more standards compliant, and they say that IE8 successfully passes the ACID2 test, so the standard utopia is (slowly) coming to reality.

In the mean time, check this site -> quirksmode that contains useful cross browser information. Also try to check any articles about ‘IE box model’ online, and stay away of padding in IE. If you also use a 3rd party javascript library (JQuery, Prototype, Dojo) you should be fine (or as fine as anyone of us can be).

Regards.