Site Compatibility or Browser Compatibility

It has been a big debate whether websites are not compatible with browsers or browsers are not compatible with websites. While webmasters and web developers claim that a certain browser is not compatible with their website, browser companies fight back saying that the websites are indeed not compatible with the browser and sometimes have even been proved.

One of the powerful weapons used by both parties in this war is web standards. Webmasters are giving more importance to validating their HTML rather than testing it on different browsers and browser companies are focusing more on supporting web standards than the rules (mostly set by IE). Opera stands out in this field and has a slogan “break the rules, follow the standards” (or is it vice versa).

As the web moves towards the second step (the web 2.0), web standards are becoming a vital and inevitable part of web development. Partly because more and more browsers are moving towards web standards (we are at the end of the IE dominated web) and especially because browsers are dominating/winning the war of compatibility. There are already plugins/addons developed to find out whether the site you are visiting uses valit HTML or not. In the near future, browsers might start displaying error pages for web pages using invalid HTML.

Web standards are simple and easier to follow and it eliminates the need to test web pages in different browsers. It is everyone’s dream for the web to be standardized rather than ruled.

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