It's an issue every web designer had to face. Since the WWW exists, and HTML pages are being browsed in more than one web browser, it's been a constant war. Websites looked ok in Internet Explorer, but not in Netscape. Sometimes they worked in IE 5.0, but not in 5.5. In Firefox, some blocks were misaligned, while in Internet Explorer 6.0, everything was a mess. Now wait for Chrome and its Webkit engine to add more pain in the neck of web designers. Did I mention Opera? Safari? Lynx?
Creating HTML for every browser is almost impossible. Even if you restrict yourself to standard browsers and standard CSS stylesheets.
The most annoying episode of this is when, as you finally managed to make it "not bad" on every browser, your customer rings you and says:
Well, I've tried your demo on my machine and it was absolutely not like the mockups!
You try to explain the customer that the website is still readable, even if blocks are a bit different from the mockup (which has been unfortunately made by a graphic designer in Illustrator, with triangles and texts following a Bezier curve, but the customer doesn't want to know about this. And then you discover his version of Internet Explorer is 10-years old and you suggest he could upgrade, and he answers: Upgrade WHAT?
Now you sigh and you have to explain that the answer to the question:
Do website need to look exactly the same in every browser?
is :
Or try to give your customers a link to: Do Websites Need to Look Exactly The Same In Every Browser? (dot com)