As web developers we have all had the cross-browser blues.  It has and for the foreseeable future, remain a fact of life when developing web applications.  The differences between CSS and JavaScript implementation plagues our ability to quickly and easily develop and layout an application to work, look, and feel the same across browsers.

A couple of weeks ago I read an interesting article on the InformationWeek web site entitled "Those Cross-Browser Blues" that highlights the problems and has a couple of suggestions to effectively tackle the problem.  At first I thought to myself, no surprises here… and "freakin IE!!". However, the article does point out the importance of testing in multiple browsers and developing web applications that work in the popular browsers, namely, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera.  According the a recent report from W3Schools, "IE in all its incarnations commands about 58% of the browser usage pie, down from its high of 90% or more, but definitely still large enough to matter."  What does that mean??  Well, get used to the dealing with IE and its quirks, and hope that IE continues to improve adherence to the standards.

The article focuses on six major issues that we should be aware of as web developers:

On thing I noticed the author didn’t highlight in the article is the increased popularity of AJAX and JavaScript to allow for more advanced web applications or RIAs.  Clients and businesses are demanding greater functionality and richer user interfaces to compete effectively on the Internet today.  This why I believe that it is more important today than ever to understand the DOM, JavaScript and other ecmascript implementation to be an effective web applications programmer. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 9:30 am.
Categories: Uncategorized.

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