Web Design Code

i recently posted a question to this forum about the reasons behin a webpage looking difrent inside of outher browsers. and then i found out that you use code to keep the design in place but the code you rite reads the browser and loads the page to the browsers specifications.

but if like me you prefer not to code how then can you do this,

i am aware that i would have to begin some codeing as i want to begin my own website but i dont no how i would lern this method of codeing that keeps this problem of messy web pages in difrent browsers at bay.

can annyone help

Couple of quickly typed suggestions which will/should help you out.

1. Use a Doctype on all of your pages. A Valid one that does not put the Browser into Quirks Mode.
2. Code to the w3c Standards if at all possible.
3. Use a Strict Doctype on New pages.
4. Set your Margins and Padding to zero at the top of your Styles and then adjust them on a per element basis as you need to.
5. Validate your page early and often. http://validator.w3.org/
6. Avoid using Tables for Page layout. They are perfect for presenting Tabular Data.
7. Use CSS to style the page. External CSS is good.
8. Build your page in a Compliant Browser and adjust for IE using IE Conditional Comments.
9. Xhtml is not required unless you plan on using XML on the pages. (I doubt you are or will be)
10. Have fun, Be creative, Learn lots...

That should be enough for now.

In line with validating your webpage using the validator suggested always make sure you test your pages in IE firefox and if you wish Opera to see how different it looks and then to sort it out with some CSS. You'd be amazed how different things look between IE and FF and i would imagine even more so than Opera because Opera is the most standards compliant.

There are a set of standards which determine which bits of HTML do what, and exactly how they should be displayed. At the moment only two browsers seem to get it right: Opera and Konqueror (and those using KHTML). The rest of the browsers out there each have their own interpretations on what the standards are, and therefore described as non-standards compliant - they basically made it up as they went along and ignored all the rules. The same code will therefore cause wildly different results in different browsers.



Even people (like me) who prefer to code their sites manually can run into troubles getting everything to look right. So, it's going to be even worse if you prefer not to code. If you use a [abbreviation=WYSIWYG]What You See Is What You Get[/abbreviation] editor then the code generated will likely not work correctly in anything other than Internet Explorer, which is the worst browser of the lot for following standards. The only way to fix the code so it works in all browsers is to download all the browsers, open the page in them, and see what needs to be fixed in your code. Some problems will be common to all of them, some will require hacks to apply to only one browser, others will be even trickier to fix.



To put it frankly, there is no way to avoid the problem of the pages looking different unless your page is incredibly basic (i.e. just some text with no layout) or you made each page one big image, which is just ridiculous. The website A List Apart goes through a lot of issues you are likely to face, and ways to get around them, along with good design practice, new ideas, etc. It's a great site to look at if you have a problem or want some inspiration. When you get on to using CSS to layout pages (as your editor should already be doing) then QuirksMode will become very useful. That site lists hundreds of common problems and the solutions to getting the code to work in every browser.