Chapter
7
Cross-browser Techniques
This chapter contains solutions for making your sites work well in many browsers.
Its unlikely that every visitor to your site is using the most up-to-date version of
Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari, so youll want to take the time to ensure that
users with older or less common browsers enjoy their experience of your site.
As weve seen, you can use CSS to separate the structure and content of your docu-
ments from the presentation of your site. If you take this approach, visitors who use
devices that cant render your designeither because theyre limited from a tech-
nical standpoint, such as some PDA or phone browsers, or as a result of their own
functional advantages, such as screen readers that speak your pages text for the
benefit of visually impaired userswill still be able to access the content. CSS gives
you the freedom to meet the needs of these users and to create beautiful designs for
the majority of users, whose browsers do support CSS.
As well as discussing the nuances of different browsers and devices, this chapter
will provide you with techniques to troubleshoot CSS bugs in browsers that support
CSS. Keep in mind that this chapter couldnt possibly cover every known CSS
bugeven if it tried, it would likely be out of date before it was printed, as new

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