CSS and Browsers

[tenaki]

Hi just a quick question.

Do all browsers support CSS?

I have just started to put together style sheets and was horrified to see the images and styles didn't show up when I went to "anybrowser.com"

All views, ideas etc welcome

Ta

[vwebworld]

Here's a quick table of what browsers
support what CSS:
http://www.jessett.com/web_sites/css..._support.shtml

~ROland

[LjN]

Just wanted to say "Thanks for the link vwebworld!"
just starting to understand CSS and have found this really useful!

[carol]

I'd be interested in hearing what others have to say about anybrowser.com. If you use their AnyBrowser Level iii site viewer, you are not seeing your site as it would be rendered by any particular browser. As they say in their FAQ, their viewer "spec provides the lowest common denominator of the level 3 browsers." Of course, most of us (and our target audience) have moved beyond the Level 3 browsers. Not all, and certainly we do need to be concerned about what those viewers are seeing. (And yes, anybrowser.com will also show you what your site will look like at other compatibility levels, like HTML 4. Transitional, Strict, etc.)

My feeling is, code to standards (and validate our pages - http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator-uri.html and http://validator.w3.org/) and don't try to force Level 3 browsers to read CSS it can't handle (import rather than link if the stylesheet contains higher level CSS). But A List Apart says it better than I can - http://www.alistapart.com/articles/netscape

So what do you think?

[httpman]

I did not look in depth to what anybrowser.com has to provide, but their "view your site like other may see it" tool just seems irrelevant to me.

My website displays fine with IE 5+, Opera7, Netscape 6+ & Mozilla, either on PC or a Mac, I can easily figure out that 98% of my visitors see it as they should... While using anybrowser.com viewing tool, those same pages are ugly and difficult to navigate.

What can be the use of such a useless tool ?
(I guess they offer others options, but once again I did not check their site in depth therefore my purpose is not to tell bad things about them. I'm just wondering what can be the use of that particular tool).

Jean-Pierre

[splinter]

I would definately say to use CSS. It's the best :D

[WebDesignDatabase]

It all depends on if you want to be on the for-front of web tech. I personaly think that most users will have a browers that supports CSS, so I use it. I know that not everyone will.

[kenmcc]

A few weeks ago I was doing a project for a client, this is what their stats package said about browsers:

IE6 or IE 5.5 80%
IE5.0 15%
IE4 2%

NS4 2%
NS6 0.07%
NS7 1.8 %

Opera < 0.01%
Mozilla < 1%
Mac 1.5%

My suggestion is that you develop primarily for IE6, incorporating an additional stylesheet for NS7 / Mozilla, mainly to ensure 'forwards compatibility'.

Browsers like Opera and NS6 don't matter, because only web designers use them! Your time is probably better spent checking your CSS looks okay in IE4!

Speaking of the devil, did you know that you can download standalone versions of IE4, IE5.0 etc? Check out http://www.skyzyx.com/downloads/ - just unzip to a folder and creat a shortcut to the .exe file. Hey presto, IE4!

[splinter]

My suggestion is that you develop primarily for IE6, incorporating an additional stylesheet for NS7 / Mozilla, mainly to ensure 'forwards compatibility'.

No no no no no.

Use ONE stylesheet for all browsers. This is pretty difficult as IE has pretty buggy CSS support for some of the more advanced things (I discovered a bug in IE6, check here for more info). I'm trying to do it with my latest site (an accessible, standards compliant, expandable, fully-featured bulletin board system) and it's quite difficult but I'm enjoying it immensely.

CSS is a great tool and it's great when you find out how to do something you thought was previously unavailable to you.

It is currently my favourite language and more sites should fully utilise it. If all the sites in the world used CSS properly it would be a much better place.

I wrote a big thing on CSS and accessibility in one of the tutorials in the Site Design: http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=14211 .

That's me done now :P

[jordanmcclements]

Kenmcc - thanks very much for the links - this is very handy indeed.

I can see that my website displays much closer to Opera 7.23 in IE3 than it does in the later versions(interesting).

But with regard to how many Opera users are hitting a web site - Opera identifies itself as 'MSIE' as default in order that badly programmed sites will not pop up a message saying 'please upgrade to Netscape version 4 in order to access this site' or some such rubbish.
But you are probably right in saying that 99.99999% of 'normal' web users would never think of using it. (But that still leaves a lot of 'abnormal' people who do!)