Mick's World

The ongoing issue of cross browser compatibility that haunts web designers continues to piss me off whenever designing a new site from scratch.

As much as you get the semantics and the CSS working, there is always some small thing that just won’t comply.

When designing this site for instance there were a couple of things that just wouldn’t budge. A seperate section of CSS was made to overwrite the default stylesheet to target Opera and IE.

Things like the nav menu, search form and a couple of other things that wouldn’t sit in place without a specific portion of CSS dedicated to that browsers demands.

Having fixed what seems to be most of the issues, there continues to be a couple of things that are still getting to me. One of which has to do with the Safari browser.

I don’t have a Mac so i can’t test it, in which case i use Safari Test. Which i recommend to do your Safari testing if you don’t have a Mac.

The problem lies with the nav menu. In my attempts to fix the issue i have not been successful yet. I put together a little bit of JavaScript to detect the browser and then load a Safari specific stylesheet. In testing this i was able to get it to work with other browsers detecting them and loading the CSS. When it comes to testing in Safari however every time is a foiled attempt.

This is an issue that continues to bug me and i would like to put it to rest. I’ve looked around for Safari browser sniffers, mainly JavaScript, most of which seem over-complicated for me needs. I’m yet to try a PHP browser sniffer as this would also be suitable.

I will continue my quest to kill the cross browser issues for this site, however the epic journey ahead of me in making future sites cross browser compatible remains.

Hopefully browsers will increase their support and CSS3 will be launched. Only time will tell…