Importance of Ensuring your Template/Web Design Browser Compatibility

Just recently, I tried using Internet Explorer (IE) to view some of my blogs, and to my surprise I found out that some templates that I were using had a browser incompatibility problem with IE.

Luckily for me, it just dropped one of the sidebars, and did not jumble the contents, although the contents are still readable, it still caused me some disappointment 'cause I only noticed it yesterday and to think that I had been using the said template for almost a year now.

What causes browser incompatibility anyways, and how come most of the time it only affects IE and not the other browsers?

Well, browser incompatibility results from the way our HTML with CSS and XHTML codes are interpreted by the browser that we use. 

Do remember that whenever we try to  access a website, our system downloads this codes and our browser interprets them. 

HTML with CSS and XHTML codings have already evolved in time. If the browser that we are using to surf the web is outdated, there is a great chance that it will interpret websites developed using the newer HTML with CSS and XHTML standards differently. 

But why is it that even if  I'm already using the latest web browser, I still encounter this kind of problem?

Although most web sites nowadays were developed using the W3C standards that helps resolve this problem in the case of IE, it was designed to use a different standards in interpreting these codes, unlike Firefox and Chrome that are W3C standards compliant.

Since HTML with CSS and XHTML codes can be written in many ways, and is still expected to produced the same type of output, when a different standards are used to read this codes, the end result is browser incompatibility -- which simply means the inability of a browser to correctly interpret HTML and CSS codes used in a website.

In my case, what caused the problem was the width setting of the sidebars.  For Goggle Chrome and Firefox, the width was interpreted correctly, but differently by IE.

The remedy, I simply increased the total width of the template from 980 to 1000.

The lesson learned?

Before you decide to use web templates that were developed by others for your website or blogger, never forget to check if this template was tested with other browsers, less you encounter same problem as I did.

Luckily enough for me, it only caused a slight problem, but what if it caused a problem that jumbled your contents?