We all know by now that primary goal of web designing is to allow all the users to have an easy access to all the information that is required by them. Although this may sound and appear quite simple and easy but the fact remains that it is quite a job to actually make this situation possible with such a cast variety of web browsers available in today’s world. Of course no business would ever want to restrict or limit its audience from accessing their piece of information just because they are using PDA, text reader or for that matter a mobile phone. It’s an un-denying fact that by day we are becoming more mobile and therefore require that all the information required by us should be available and accessible all the time.
Graceful degradation is a process which makes your site to step down in a way that it does not fail completely but instead operates in a way that it provides a reduced level of service. Although graceful degradation is undoubtedly a great concept but it fails especially with non desktop browsers whose devices do not necessarily have bandwidth, memory or for that matter the resolution capabilities in order to display such pages. And this is where the concept of Progressive Enhancement comes into play.
Progressive Enhance is an approach for web designing which builds the documents for the least capable devices first ad then finally moves on for enhancing further the presentation of these documents in such a way that it does not really put any kind of undue burden on the baseline devices but instead provides a richer environment especially for those users that use modern graphical user interface. In this concept only one markup document is used but a wide variety of style sheets are used which thereby aid in providing a progressive and an enhanced experience across a wide variety of browsers available.
Progressive enhancement can therefore be described as the process of not only separating the content from its presentation but also making distinction in the manner of displaying the web content in different browsers right from the lowest common denominator one and also for building the structure in order to add more features especially for those browsers which can really handle them. The internet technologies are increasing at very rapid speed and there are more and more devices that are available in diversified forms for users so as to have access to all the information anywhere and anytime. Therefore it is becoming quite imperative that the organizations make up websites which have features that support the wide audience.
Progressive Enhancement therefore provides a viable approach so as to enable the delivery of information as required by the customers while embracing accessibility, future compatibility and also determining user experiences especially dependent on the capabilities of new devices. It is progressive which gives all the web designers freedom of preparing once and presenting it anywhere. Therefore just make one document and keep on using it on all levels of browsers just by using wide variety of cascading sheets.
Cross browser compatibility can be well stated as compatibility of any given website with all the major browsers available such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, Safari, Opera and JAWS. It is a very common feature that your ideal version of the site is not able to create a pixel perfect replication in all the browsers. A website designer always writes the code considering any particular web browser, most commonly internet explorer; as a result a website may be working fine with one browser but not supporting the other browsers the same way. Therefore it is very important that each website owner should always test for the cross browser compatibility of their respective websites.
Although you may be having your own preference for a browser but the visitors for your website may not be using the same web browser as you. This is where the cross browser compatibility makes all the difference. Cross browser compatibility mainly deals with the functionality of the website and not with how it would look like. Infact, it has very little to do with browsers as well and can be well stated as multi user agent compatibility. When we refer to the term compatibility here, we do not mean looks and behaves identically; instead here it typically means that it performs equivalently under alternative conditions.
Functionality is simply the absolute key to cross browser compatibility. A lack of cross browser compatibility does not mean that the site looks different on all the different types of browsers but it simply means that the site doesn’t work on all the other browsers except for one, for which it has been designed. It is entirely possible though occasionally, to make two browsers renders a same design, but only on a condition that you make certain factors such as the user settings constant. Everything would just go out of the window if you try to tamper with those settings. It is always desirable to make the designs of your website as similar as possible between various browsers, but at the same time it is quite important to understand that there are always certain limitations to it.
It is very important to take certain factors into consideration which designing any website which would aid in cross browser compatibility. Firstly, it is very important to use only standard compliant coding. The HTML tags and features used while coding should not be browser specific. As these would only work in those browsers that they have been created for and can even lead to breakage of the web page when viewed in any other browser. Always remember to validate all your web pages which include the HTML or XHTML coding and cascading style sheets using the free validation service from W3C.
There is nothing much that can be done to keep a similar view across all the different browsers, instead you should try and guarantee something which is achievable, i.e. an equivalent view for all. Equivalent here means that the users should be able to get the similar information and also use the website to perform similar functions. Our main goal with cross browser compatibility is to make the website viewable in all major browsers and at the same time have the pages rendered correctly. Always remember that a website that doesn’t work in any choice o browser will surely drive the visitors away.
