Cross-browser compatibility can be a major pain. The philosophy for most web developers is to code against a standard-complaint browser (Chrome), then apply CSS hacks later for other browsers that need to play catch up (Internet Explorer). In other words, it is better to make your code forward-compatible and apply backward-compatible hacks instead of the other way around.

One technique for cross-browser compatibility is using conditional comments in the HTML like this:

This works great, but it is very awkward and ...

Now that Internet Explorer 9 has cooled off the press, we can alas rejoice that all new PC's and mobile devices are supporting HTML5! This brings a new era that aims to refactor the web in a whole new way. As you will see, HTML5 provides us code slimming techniques that make our HTML source code much more easier and functional.

New Structural Tags

The HTML5 specification has added several useful tags for structuring markup. These tags will replace many of the typical div entries from our code.

• <header>

  The header element contains introductory information to a section or page. ...

Fans of Internet standards, rejoice!  Today Microsoft officially brings us Internet Explorer 9 which scores a 95 out of 100 on the ACID3 test and passes the CSS Selectors Test with flying colors.  It’s worth noting that IE9’s ACID3 score is one point more than the current version of Mozilla’s Firefox, but still five points below Chrome and Safari.  Many developers will also be very happy to know that this latest offering from Microsoft implements many of the new features of HTML5!

To me, IE9 is a story of Microsoft finally starting to catch up to the other browsers, but ...