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How to make my site stay the same in IE and GOOGLE CHROME
I redesigned my site recently. It looks fine in Google Chrome but changes in IE, all the text is to the left and the size is bigger and I cannot see my Google Pisca Album, What happened and how must I fix it, I am using KOMPOZER, is the the problem or what?
Best Answer
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- Brielle Nikaido
Helen,
Sounds like your laying out your site in Tables. That's a common practice, but you should really be looking to do it with DIVs instead for greater flexibility. Also makes the code a little easier to read and is better for Section 508 accessibility (and some say for SEO as well!)
Ryan
Hi Ryan
Thank you so much, im new in the business and have challenges daily, but im learning. I do understand what you have said and will invest in one of the books you recommended. I eventually messed around with all the settings and found that i had to change the format of the page as to a cell not a column, strange, but it seemed to have sorted out the problem and the site looks good. I do enjoy my work and realise that i need to learn daily to keep up with all the changes on the net.
Once again, thank you, take care.
Helen
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Welcome to the wonderful world of Internet Explorer.
The reason why it looks correct in Chrome, (and probably Firefox and Safari) is because those browsers are Standards Compliant browsers (the World Wide Web Consortium - http://w3c.org - lists 'standards' so that any site coded to those standards should work the same way across all browsers).
The problem is that Internet Explorer is NOT an Standards compliant browser. IE always has done things differently, and while each new version of IE is getting better at conforming to standards - IE8 (which most people use) is still not standards compliant and will under certain circumstances make your website look strange. (in IE7 the problems are probably worse, and IE6 is just horrible to deal with!).
The trick to fixing this is to code your website so that it handles both standards compliant browsers and the IE browsers. You do this by specifying specifying specific style-sheets (CSS files) for each browser in your website code. like this:
These spreadsheets control how the website looks in each browser and you then adjust for look/feel in those stylesheets. As you see, I start off with my main stylesheet (which you already have) and then "override" the main stylesheet with "hacks" to for IE in the indivigual IE (8, 7, 6) stylesheets.
If your unfamiliar with styles and style-sheets, I highly recommend the books "Bulletproof Web Design" and "CSS Mastery" so you can find out specifically what is different between IE and the other browsers. CSS is relatively easy to learn, but there is a lot TO learn - far more than what I can explain here.
So why isn't IE standards compliant? Well its a long long story, but basically IE was around before standards were really put into place. IE doesn't want to "break" any sites that originally were developed specifically for the older versions of IE, so they have been much slower to adopt the W3C standards. The other part is that it's a Microsoft product, and Microsoft always thinks it can do things better than anyone else - so they march to the beat of their own drummer :-). I will say that they ARE getting better though . . .
Dealing with IE is why web developers make decent money. Any 5 year old can make a website these days, but its balancing the browsers, usability, SEO, etc that make a web developer worth their paychecks.
Oh, and one other key thing is NEVER develop a site to work just for IE and then hack it up to work in Firefox, Chrome, etc. ALWAYS start with the standards compliant way of doing things, and then adjust it for IE. Eventually IE will become standards compliant!
Hope that helps
Ryan