Which Web Browser to Use For Testing Your Website

What is a Website Programmer? Answer. Someone who has taken at least two years to learn and experience the art of writing web pages by hand, in the HTML programming language. And even this would not qualify you as a website programmer really. A "Proper" website programmer is someone who can programme, by hand, in HTML (HyperText Markup Langauge), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), PHP (Personal Home Page and then PHP Hypertext Preprocessor), JavaScript, MySQL and other programming/scripting languages. So what has this got to do with Web Browsers? Well. If you are not a website programmer and you (or someone you have hired) are using a HTML Software Package such as Dreamweaver to create your web pages; You should be aware of the following:

LAYOUT ENGINES

A Layout Engine is basically the core coding of a web browser that dictates how it should format (i.e. display, position and style) Text, Images, Tables, Paragraphs, Embed Audio/Video and so on. Although the website programmer has some control of this formatting via HTML and CSS instructions, at the end of the day web browsers have their own unique way of interpreting the website programmer's instructions. For example. If a website programmer creates a questionnaire form made up of standard elements (i.e. drop-down menus, edit boxes and check (tick) boxes) most, if not all, web browsers should display those elements perfectly - In the correct positions, just as specified by the programmer. However. If the programmer decides to use a scripting language such as JavaScript or JQuery to create the same questionnaire form things may go wrong; Simply because the standard code would be understood by all web browsers whereas the JavaScript or JQuery code might not be understood by all web browsers. This could mean the elements are not positioned properly and/or are displayed too big or small for example. These errors (bugs) can be caused by the programmer's code, the web browser's layout engine, the scripting language or all three.

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