Browser Portability

Ensuring a consistent look and feel on client-side browsers is one of the great challenges of developing web-based applications. Currently, a standard does not exist to which soft- ware developers must adhere when creating web browsers. Although browsers share a com- mon set of features, each browser might render pages differently. Browsers are available in many versions and on many different platforms (Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, Linux, UNIX, etc.). Vendors add features to each new version that sometimes result in cross-platform incompatibility issues. Clearly it is difficult to develop web pages that ren- der correctly on all versions of each browser. In this book we develop web applications that execute on both the Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 browsers.

Portability Tip 1.4

The web is populated with many different browsers, which makes it difficult for authors and web application developers to create universal solutions. The W3C is working toward the goal of a universal client-side platform. 1.4