Dreamweaver MX: The Missing Manual

Check Target Browsers

As noted earlier in this book, different browsers don’t always display HTML in the same way. What’s worse, older browsers don’t even understand a lot of the code that Dreamweaver can produce, because it may conform to HTML standards that were developed only in recent years.

The best way to ensure that visitors see your site the way you intend it is to frequently preview your pages in as many browsers on as many computers as possible. In this way, you can identify and fix problems early.

But if you don’t happen to have old computers with old browsers lying around your basement, Dreamweaver can identify elements of a page that won’t work in older browsers, or that might be supported by only a single browser. For example, the <layer> tag (see page 381) works only in Netscape 4, while the <marquee> tag is specific to Internet Explorer.

The File→Check Target Browsers command checks the HTML of pages you’ve selected and generates a report that tells you if you’ve used code that doesn’t work in various versions of Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. You can choose which versions of the browsers you’d like to test, all the way back to the 2.0 version, which is still being used by Jason P. O’Gillicuddy of Muddy Ditch, Kansas.

Dreamweaver then creates a Web page listing any errors it’s found (see Figure 15-1). The most common culprits are Cascading Style Sheets, layers, and JavaScript created by Dreamweaver’s Behaviors. These relatively new Web technologies work only ...