Designers Learn Code: Cross Browser Compatibility
As mentioned before, cross browser compatibility is the process by which we make sure our code works across multiple devices, platforms, and browsers. Since different browsers support css code in different ways, one way to help resolve this issue is to use a CSS reset. This is a set of CSS rules that "resets" the styling of all HTML elements to the same baseline. When we were looking at the table of contents in a css stylesheet a few episodes ago, you may recall that one of the first sections of code in that stylesheet was "normalize." This is an example of a CSS reset. Normalize.css is a set of CSS rules that sets browsers to a baseline of modern standards and is an open source code on github. Another way to make sure your code works on particular browsers is to use conditional comments. This was common practice when it was necessary to support Internet Explorer which tended to be the most problematic. These days, we would only need to support Internet Explorer if we knew that our target audience is likely to have an older system using this browser. Vendor prefixes are used to make sure to target particular browsers that may not yet be keeping up with W3C standards and the latest CSS3 releases. These are the vendor prefixes for the most popular browsers:
moz for Mozilla Firefox
ms for Internet Explorer
o for Opera
webkit for Safari and Chrome
Finally, we would run our code through an HTML and CSS validator. There are free options available and these will "validate" or make sure your code is correct. We will be alerted if we have syntax or any other errors so that we can fix them prior to releasing our code for wide use.
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In this coding bootcamp, you will not only learn about code but also have hand’s on practical and by the end of the course, you will have coded your first web page. This course is suitable for beginners as we go over the basics. The course does touch upon topics that may be more familiar to those who are designers. This may be helpful to those who want to learn how to create websites with design in mind.