Re: FN-FORUM: Web pages appearing same on an apple as on windows

date posted 6th October 2006 09:29

On 5 Oct 2006, at 8:59 pm, Jon Ambrose at BTOW wrote:

>
> Apologies if this is a stupid question (which I am sure some of you
> out
> there will no doubt tell me it is!!) but is there a method in terms
> of a
> script or some additional code in the web page by which one can
> ensure that
> a web pages layout appears the same on an apple mac as it does on a
> windows
> pc?

There are really two overall things that you need to do to start with
in order to get the closest possible match across different browsers
and different types of computer.

The first thing is to create your web pages using web standards. That
means, write your pages in either xhtml (my preference) or html 4.01
format. Ensure that you have a doctype declaration (http://
www.alistapart.com/articles/doctype/) as the first item on the page.
These will help to ensure that browsers read your page in standards
compliance mode rather than quirks mode. Once written, confirm that
your pages meet whatever doctype using one of the online checkers
(such as http://validator.w3.org/).

The second thing to do is to write your page using structural divs
and CSS rather than tables. this ensures that your markup and your
content are separated.

This is actually a huge question and deserves more than a four-line
answer. To get to grips with this I would advise you start looking at
sites like A List Apart (http://alistapart.com/), Eirc Meyer's site
(http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/) and the various Web Standards sites
(http://www.webstandards.org/, http://webstandardsgroup.org/). I
found this article useful: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/
journey/ BTW - a nice encapsulation of most of the above.

Good luck,


Ian.
--
Ian Piper
Tellura Information Services - the web, document and information people
http://www.tellura.co.uk/
01926 811574 | 07973 156616
skype: ianmpiper
Key Minder : easy to use, inexpensive, industrial strength password
protection : http://www.tellura.co.uk/keyminder/
--