Website compatability between IE / FF

[a21ozcoldcup]

I build my mostly ghetto sites on my lappy at 1900x1220 (or whatever is close to that) and I use Dreamweaver / Firefox. I build all the sights to be viewed best at 1024x768 but never actually switch over and check how they look before I publish.

Today for the first time I looked at some of them with IE (at work) and was horrified, I mean it's not like I have anything complicated but what looks decent and as I expected in FF looks all sorts of stupid in IE. Mostly it's line spacing issues and images not displaying at the right size.

Any ideas on how to avoid these things? Is there a list of tags that work on both types of browsers or a list of which ones to avoid .. specifically for sizing and spacing of things?

[geekbot]

Sick, sick addon for inspecting, testing, debugging CSS layouts, Javascript, AJAX, html

http://www.getfirebug.com/

For IE compatibility, test in IE.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1429

You really should think about designing for, and testing down to 800 or smaller. Consider iPhones, Treos, etc.

That's all I have to say about that.

[bubbles19518]

Something like this:

<div id="wrap">All ofyour sites code here</div>

then in your CSS have:

#wrap {
width:800px;
}

That way you at least know your site will be the same size in all browsers.

As for making it look good, I would design it to look good in Firefox, then it should work pretty well in IE for the most part. There are a few exceptions but thats because IE sucks.

[Money]

There are a few exceptions but thats because IE sucks.

^^

[Zerzera]

Maybe check the DOCTYPE.

The earlier IE versions have terrible screwups, you should at least test on IE7 considering about ~85% of your visitors will use any IE version.
If you give a shit about people who use older IE versions, there is a program named MultipleIEs, that includes older versions so you can see what your site looks like in those.

NOTE: "Best viewed" shouldn't be your target in my opinion, you either should make a 'liquid' website that uses the entire document-size or make it static and then it doesn't really matter what the document-size is.
Mind that people's resolution doesn't equal their document-size, not everyone will put his browser on full-screen. (And taskbars might decrease the size too)

[Maverick]

If you give a shit about people who use older IE versions, there is a program named MultipleIEs, that includes older versions so you can see what your site looks like in those.

Thanks for the tip, I needed such program to test a website I'm developing on different (older) IE browsers.

[Evul Fly]

[Denon]

http://www.htmldog.com
Get some proper standards compliance going on. In particular, get your head around the box model.

For all I know, you already know about these, but I can't be bothered asking then having to post again.

[a21ozcoldcup]

Nice man, very nice.


...


Thanks for the tips guys. I'm definitely going to be using a few.