Chapter 11. Developing cross-browser strategies
This chapter covers
- Strategies for developing reusable, crossbrowser JavaScript code
- Analyzing the issues needing to be tackled
- Tackling those issues in a smart way
Anyone who’s been developing on-page JavaScript code for more than five minutes knows that there’s a wide range of pain points when it comes to making sure that the code works flawlessly across a set of supported browsers. These considerations span everything from the basic development for immediate needs, to planning for future browser releases, all the way to reusing code on web pages that have yet to be created.
Coding for multiple browsers is certainly a nontrivial task, and one that must be balanced according to the development methodologies that you have in place, as well as the resources available to your project. As much as we’d love for our pages to work perfectly in every browser that ever existed or will ever exist, reality rears its ugly head and we must realize that we have finite development resources. We must plan to apply those resources appropriately and carefully, getting the biggest bang for our buck from them.
The primary concern when deciding where to direct our limited resources is deciding which browsers we’ll primarily support with our code.