Making your web page compatible with Firefox
The following is a list of things to review so that a web page is compatible, not only with Firefox, but with any browser which implements the latest standards, including of course Mozilla derivates as Camino, Galeon, Epiphany, etc.
Some might say that making a page compatible requires double the
effort
in making it, and that is not worth the trouble since everybody uses
explorer
.
In this article I want to show that this is not true. It's
roughly the same effort to make a page that is compatible with Firefox
as
one that that is not.
This text does not intend to tell you how to make pages compatible with ancient browsers (as Netscape 4 or Explorer 4) That would certainly be a much larger task. This article aims to guide you about supporting browsers that are very similar in their support of things like dynamic HTML. It's not necessary to have a page for each kind of browser, it's better to share the code while taking into account the small differences. The details enumerated here will be used for browsers like Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape 6+, Konqueror, Opera, Apple's Safari, etc.. Some of the properties explained which are equivalent to those of Explorer don't belong to any standard, these cases will be noted.
Sripting. The great majority of the compatibility problems falls in this category, specially in "AJAX" applications. And they are not generally problems with the JavaScript language itself, but with the fact that the browsers represents the page in objects differently. A different API, sortof. This API is called the DOM (although in Microsoft docs you should search for DHTML instead).
Let's now see which are the most common problems...