Using Proper DOCTYPE to Fix Browser Compatibility Issues
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Firefox's growing market share provides just one strong argument among many for not designing for a single browser anymore. But how compatible is your website, and what can you do to make it work better with a variety of browsers? Anthony Hart explains the dangers of outdated DOCTYPE, and how to avoid them.
What All Designers Face
You have created a website that will promote yourself and/or a product like no one has ever created before. You take the time to craft all of the proper CSS to govern the way you wish the site to materialize; you vigilantly use the Document Object Model to manipulate dynamic elements on the site; you even spend the time to optimize the site so that it will be found on the most-used search engines on the planet. You have gone to all this effort to sell your website to the masses on the Information Super Highway...but your website does not function in the latest browsers. By “latest browsers,” we mean browsers such as Mozilla, Opera, Netscape 6 and 7, Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari.
It has been documented over the course of Web design history that defective DOCTYPE was and still is the cause of this compatibility issue among advanced Web browsers today. This article offers a solution to end the upsetting events you have been through because of the DOCTYPE you are using for your website only works with older versions of Internet Explorer. What I have tried to accomplish with this article is to provide actual examples of the proper way to use DOCTYPE, screenshots of genuine cases where DOCTYPE has been used to eliminate the browser compatibility issues. I will also suggest several outside solutions not covered in this article for your further review.
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