Car Dealer Inventory App Works With All Current Browsers.

Car Dealer Inventory Application Web Site
Vehicle Listing Software, Full Car Dealer Web Sites
or Plug-In Inventory Module for your Currrent Web Site.
Please Note: You are viewing the unstyled version
of carsinlondon.com Either your browser does not
support CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) or it is disabled.

WYSIWYG vs hand-coding:

If you use a WYSIWYG program you will be using tables for presentation mark up. Presentation belongs in you CSS file not mixed in with your content. Tables should be used only for tabular data.

Putting all your presentation data in CSS means your content (htm, html) files will be smaller and the CSS file(s) that contain the presentation code will be cached after the first page.

Code Editors:

You may want to give HTML-KIT try . It has some nice features and it is free. It has over 1,000,000 downloads on CNET so it is getting quite common.

IE4 and Netscape 4.x :

As far as IE4.x NS4.x (esp ns4.x) they are not going to work with lots of CSS. What I have done is drawn the line. I don't try to support IE4.x or NS4.x as far as expecting them to see my pages the same way all the other current browsers see them.

To do this what I have done is hide my CSS from both IE4.x and NS4.x so that when my sites are accessed they just see the content. They can still navigate the site via the menu and they get a message at the top of the page noting that their browser doesn't support CSS (or it's turned off).

I apply an ID to this message and mark it display:none; so that CSS browsers done see it.

To hide the CSS from IE4.x and NS4.x some people use js but I like to only use js when nessary so after some hunting I came up with the solution below. The below adds your CSS file to the page but hides it from IE4.x and NS4.x .

If you want to see how its done in Javascript check this page out.

Browser Testing:

Download all the IE browsers and install them on your box. Check your page as you build it against IE5.01 & 5.5 because they don't support all the CSS that IE6.0 does or all the current browsers do.

Also I have the following browsers installed and test my pages against them: Opera7; NS 6.2.3, 7.1; Mozilla 1.6; Firefox 0.8 . And if you want to go over board set your work on Safari 1.2 on iCapture or Browser Cam.

W3C Tested:

You also want to test your pages for W3C validate. When having problems with web page the first thing you should do is go and validate your page to make sure its not some thing that is wrong with the code. It is also just a good practice to get into.

Most browsers are quite forgiving with incorrect code but there will always be a browser or browser version some where that will display your page funny because your using code that is not valid.

doctype:

Most know about this but doctype is important. Make sure it is at the very top of the page. If it isn't IE will drop down from standard mode to quirks mode and display you page different.

Personally I am using the XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype. I had all my paged done as HTML 4.01 Strict and then in April where I heard about the new virus' that when you got infected it would check all html & htm files to see if they validated XHTML 1.0 Strict. If they didn't validate the virus would then deleted them. When I found this out I decided it was time to switch over!

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">