I wanted to know if there is a code to use for browser issues. Whenever i use a different browser from internet explorer, for e.g., Firefox, my site looks slightly different, it just throws off the format, so i wanted to see if there is some kind of code that allows your format to remain the same regardless of what browser your pages is viewed from. Thanks!
No. Not in the sense I have the impression you mean, where you add some or something. It probably will be possible to create pages that look more or less the same in most browsers if you use valid code and avoid browserspecific tricks. If this is truly important to you, you need to view your site often in many different browsers (and remember that Explorer is about half a dozen different browsers). But the browser issue is only the beginning. People have all kinds of different screen and other settings. You may ask yourself if sameness is really that important. Have a look at this article
The article that Corwings points out has an extra quote mark in the URL. Just take the quote mark out to get to the right page. The article has some interesting points about "adaptability", and I think that Mark's posting has somewhat the same intent.
You can't do much about rendering differences between the different browsers. One browser may, for example, render a image border slightly wider than another. Or the color shades may vary. But none of that should be an issue. What a designer is mainly worried about is, does the header, main body, sidebars, and footer generally turn up in the correct areas of the page? Can a visitor read it? Will it adapt to various browser resolutions and user resizing?
Well, Mark is using one of the templates from the template gallery. These templates are touted as CSS Templates, and the article that Corwings link to, is also touting CSS. If you dissect the template, you can see that it follows many of the ideas presented in the article. As an example, fonts. The CSS Templates specifies fonts with relative units, like EM, which allows for a more consistent rendering across browsers. While the templates do not make all content areas flexible, they do allow for the overall structure to adapt to resizing.
But one of the HTML objects that helps these templates look the same in, say IE and Firefox, is the DOCTYPE tag. And, as usual, problem is that the Bravenet Visual editor deletes DOCTYPE tags. The DOCTYPE tag attempts to direct browsers to adhere to certain rendering standards. Which will make your site look generally the same in most browsers. I tend to check my web pages in IE, Firefox, and Netscape. That's because, according to the statistics for may last 6,668 visitors, they show 41.99% IE, 31.91% Firefox, and 15.3% Netscape. That's almost 90% of my visitors. Opera comes in at around 2.58%, and should probably be included in my check, but I really don't feel like downloading another browser.
So, Mark, if you look at the original HTML file from the template, you should see a DOCTYPE tag as the first line. But in your web pages, the tag is missing. This is due to the Visual editor deleting it when you save your work. You can put it back in with the Text editor, but any time you open it again in the Visual editor, it will be erased. But that one line, will take care of most of your formatting issues.
A better option, to using the on-line editors, would be downloading something like NVU or KOMPOZER. These are free applications that will let you design on your PC, and then upload your changes to your site. Either of them works well with the templates from Bravenet. This can help you get around any display issues you might run into, without having to work around editor issues.
