This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Checking Browser Compatibility
Your target audience will determine what browser versions you should check to make sure all the pages within your site are compatible with a certain browser version. In most cases, you want to make sure that they are at least compatible with a 4.0 browser or later. Very few people use a 2.0 browser, and for that matter, very little on the Web today is even compatible with a 2.0 browser. You may want to make sure your site is compatible with a 3.0, however, if you have a very broad, general audience.
That's why it's very important as a Web developer to test your site in many browsers and on different browser versions. Instead of installing every version on your computer and testing them manually, a command within Dreamweaver performs this task for you. This Dreamweaver command, called Check Target Browsers, has a series of profiles that you test your pages against. Dreamweaver ships with profiles for Netscape Navigator 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, and 7.0. It also ships with profiles for Internet Explorer 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, and Opera (Mac) 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, and 7.0 as well as options for Safari. You can also download additional profiles from the Macromedia Exchange.
Dreamweaver will either check a single document or an entire folder. It's important to know that Dreamweaver will not check scripts in the documents; however, you can debug scripts within each browser, which is covered in Chapter 11, "Behaviors."
To run the Check Target Browser command to ensure compatibility across browsers, follow these steps:
Select which file or folder you want to check by highlighting it within the File panel. You can also perform this command on an individual file when it is open.
In the toolbar, click the Browser Support menu and choose Settings. This opens the Target Browsers dialog box as displayed in Figure 3.24.
Inside the dialog box, check all the Web browsers you'd like to check to make sure your page is compatible with that version. Use the drop-down menus to specify which version of the browser you would like to check against.
Click the Check button. After the checking process is complete, Dreamweaver returns results inside the Results panel shown in Figure 3.25. For a better look, click the Browser Report button on the left side to view the report in a Web page, as shown in Figure 3.26.
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Figure 3.24 The Check Target Browser dialog box offers the option of checking
compatibility with various browsers.
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Figure 3.25 The results appear inside the Results panel.
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Figure 3.26 The HTML document provides feedback about the check performed
by the Check Target Browser command.