Compatible and Browser-specific Pages

Each browser, as we've seen, can support a different set of features and has different capabilities. This obviously makes creating pages that will display correctly on all your visitor's browsers a difficult proposition. There are generally three ways to tackle this. You can:

Using the table we provided earlier in this chapter, you can figure out roughly what percentage of the total number of visitors' browsers support the different feature categories, adjusting the values of each browser to match the demographics of your own site. We'll see how you can collect the information to do this in Chapters 8 and 9. Then you can just offer pages that use the appropriate features set for all those browsers.

However, this will generally mean sacrificing most of the things that make you pages more exciting, more attractive, and easier for visitors to use. Instead, you may prefer to either build compatible pages that work acceptably on most browsers yet take advantage of newer features, or build separate pages for different types of browser and send the most appropriate one back to the user.

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