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As a web designer browser compatibility issues are an unfortunate fact of life, but one that you must make adjustments for. There are always issues with one browser or another, and in particular a browser that gives me trouble is Internet Explorer. The issues are mostly in the interpretation of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).IE basically screws a lot of things up, and you end up making adjustments for that.

I always follow the following rules when developing web sites to avoid the least amount of problems.

1) Code with XHTML and CSS, using web standards and semantic markup
2) Validate this code through the W3C validator to ensure there are no errors
3) Adjust and make changes in a modern standards complaint browser like Firefox
4) Once everything looks good in Firefox, check internet explorer and pray.
5) If necessary write CSS to target IE inequities, and use conditional comments, so they other good browsers don't pick up the IE specific styles

When trying to do pinpoint design, it's really difficult to achieve perfection making everything look the same it multiple browsers, but it can be done. It just often takes a lot of extra time and patience!

Learn more about this author, Bruce Gilbert.
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