Talk:Cross-browser compatibility

Examples of cross browser coding
This section needs removing, re-structuring or re-naming this section. It is a borderline 'how to' section and gives an incomplete view of 'cross-browser'. It's demonstrating how to style an element with JavaScript, which in itself is a nightmare. It is also incomplete as there are many many more ways to perform 'cross browser coding' including conditional statements, general CSS, CSS hacks. Please reply with any suggestions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Henryz14 (talk • contribs) 15:15, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I have removed this section. # Henry Brown 10:29, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

Structurally wrong?
I personally feel the text of this articles has some major problems:


 * "Cross-browser refers to the ability [...] to support all the web browsers." What is "support"? Does it mean the code is rendered and behaves exactly the same on all web browsers? This is impossible because many browsers have technical limitations that make it impossible to exactly the same things as other web browsers. Or does "support" just mean that any web browser accepts the code and renders it to the best of it's capabilities? In that case any HTML/CSS/JS code is cross-browser by definition because the specifications have always been very clear that any browser should make its own decisions on how to render.
 * "Cross-browser refers to the ability [...] to support all the web browsers." This is even more ridiculous. There is nobody in the world that knows about all web browsers out there. This article compares a list of 5 rendering engines (which by the way has no place in this article, this isn't an article about rendering engines), but that doesn't even come close to representing all browsers.
 * "The term cross-browser is often confused with multi-browser." I don't see any Wikipedia article on "Multi-browser", and less than 800,000 hits on Google, so I doubt if anybody is actually using that term as a definition.
 * From the article Cross-platform: "In computing, cross-platform, or multi-platform, is an attribute conferred to computer software or computing methods and concepts that are implemented and inter-operate on multiple computer platforms." So why can cross-platform mean the same as multi-platform, but cross-browser is supposedly meaning something else then multi-browser? I am not buying it.
 * And for the cream on the cake: this article originally said "Cross-browser refers to the ability [...] to support multiple web browsers". The change to "all web browsers" was made on 21 February 2008 by an anonymous user who is only known by it's IP address. From this IP address, two other edits have been made to Wikipedia; one reducing the bust size of a German porn actress, the other one looks like an advertisement link. (Of course, this could just be random edits from a dynamic IP address.)

I would vote for restoring the mention of multiple web browsers instead of all, removing the distinction with "multi-browser", and cleaning up any other text related to this definition. However, I don't just want to go in the text and make these changes, because other people might have valid reasons for keeping this definition as it stands now.

What do you think? Peter (talk)


 * I agree with Peter that this article has major problems and should be rewritten. To take the smallest problem first, it is completely outdated: the two dominant browsers are no longer MSIE version 4 and Netscape.
 * In addition to the cogent points made by Peter I would suggest:
 * There are basically two approaches to achieve cross-browser capability: (1) using the subset of the W3C standards that current versions of the most common browsers all implement correctly; (2) browser sniffing. (Of course, both of those statements beg several questions). The article should either: simply define what "cross-browser" means - in which case it will be a very short article - or define it, and compare those two ways of achieving it.
 * Barbacana (talk) 17:18, 20 March 2011 (UTC)


 * Be Bold! and change the article. mabdul 17:37, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Links in subsection titles
This article uses links in headings, violating Section headings - "Headings should not normally contain links". --Mortense (talk) 13:07, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Not Original Research
No, none of this is original research. Of course, last I checked, Wikipedia eschews technical newsgroups (e.g. CLJ) as sources. Unfortunately, that's where cross-browser scripting has been discussed historically.

This is the start of the same argument that got the My Library page deleted. If you are going to cite clueless bloggers on the topic of JS and cross-browser scripting, then you will have to accept expert accounts from related newsgroups. 75.186.15.4 (talk) 01:47, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Also, one of the examples is in blog-form. It's a fairly influential article, cited in many subsequent articles on the subject and it originated from discussions on CLJ, which can be cited as well. That's where cross-browser scripting was discussed primarily from roughly 1996 through 2006. After that the Ajax craze gave birth to thousands of JS blogs, which tended to drown out the technical newsgroups. An encyclopedia should reflect the most informed sources at the time, not the loudest.

http://michaux.ca/articles/feature-detection-state-of-the-art-browser-scripting — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.186.15.4 (talk) 03:51, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Some moron tried to Spam this article with dubious links
Now they are in some sort of retaliatory tug of war. Completely ridiculous, but going to restructure the entire article in near future to remove any and all lists (will be made into footnotes). Article has been here for years, but nothing ever came up until this idiot decided to post "cross-browser testing" links, which are highly inappropriate for this article.

They should have actually read the article first, then they would have understood that *no amount of empirical evidence gathering can determine cross-browser code*. Test in a 100 browsers, still no certainty that it is cross-browser. Keep going until infinity, still don't know. Have to actually read the *code* to find out. Even a failed test would not indicate that the code isn't cross-browser (may just have a hole in its feature detection/testing).

If *anybody* is qualified to write and curate this article, history says it is me. ;)

- David Mark