Testing Webpages in Different Browsers

An essential part of developing a website is testing to make sure it displays correctly in different browsers and on different operating systems.

Here are a couple of sites that can help with this.

browsers.evolt.org is an archive of old browser versions for windows, mac, linux and other operating systems. You can download virtually every browser that has ever existed and test your sites with them. Handily, the old versions of Internet Explorer can be installed as ’stand alone’ applications so they don’t interfere with your current IE version.

If you don’t have access to browsers on different operating systems, Browsershots.org is an excellent free service that generates screenshots of a webpage in different browsers on Linux, Windows and Mac. Of course, this only shows that a page is displaying correctly, it doesn’t show anything dynamic like hover effects etc, but it’s better than nothing.

HTML Tag Reference

It’s not easy to remember the multitude of html tags and their attributes, so it’s good to have somewhere to go for a quick recap.

My favourite site for most HTML help is Your HTML Source, which has a great glossary of HTML tags. It clearly outlines the correct usage for the all the common tags and many you might not normally think of using.

It’s a good idea to use an existing tag if possible, rather than defining your own class, as it makes your code more compliant with web standards and screen readers.

Lorem Ipsum Text Generator

Lorem Ipsum text is dummy text used to fill out page layouts so you can see what the design will look like with text flowing through it.

It has the same spacing and structure as real text, but because it is Latin the reader is not distracted by the meaning of the words (unless you understand Latin of course).

The Lorem Ipsum Generator generates however many paragraphs or sentences of dummy text you need.