How far does ASP.NET keep up with its Browser Compatibility?

[ms]

Hi Everyone,

You all would be aware of the fact that we boast about .net supporting
multiple web browsers. I hope we have all experienced that our screen
layouts look different in
every other browser. (Netscape being the worst!) So how far can we agree on
this statement?


Manoj

 

[Hans Kesting]

Hi Everyone,

You all would be aware of the fact that we boast about .net supporting
multiple web browsers. I hope we have all experienced that our screen
layouts look different in
every other browser. (Netscape being the worst!) So how far can we agree on
this statement?


Manoj

"supports" is not the same as "looks and feels exactly the same".
You *can* visit an asp.net site with a browser other than IE.

But you are right, the browser detection is not up to date.
Search for "browser caps" to find more up to date browser detection
code. (and more discussion about this subject)

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Anders_Nor=E5s?=]

Hi Everyone,

You all would be aware of the fact that we boast about .net supporting
multiple web browsers. I hope we have all experienced that our screen
layouts look different in
every other browser. (Netscape being the worst!) So how far can we agree on
this statement?

The ASP.NET engine examines the UserAgent string to determine which
browser the user is using. ASP.NET then chooses a TagWriter to use when
rendering pages. HtmlTextWriter is used for "up level browsers", which
in practice is Internet Explorer 4.0 and up. For all other browsers,
ASP.NET uses Html32TextWriter. These settings are configurable, so you
can indicate that modern versions of Netscape, Firefox and Opera use the
HtmlTextWriter class as opposed to Html32TextWriter. These settings are
configured through the <browserCaps> section in either the
machine.config or Web.config files.

For an updated browserCaps section visit
http://slingfive.com/pages/code/browserCaps/browserCaps_spaces.txt

Anders Norås
http://dotnetjunkies.com/weblog/anoras/

 

[Steven Cheng[MSFT]]

Hi Manoj,

Welcome to ASPNET newsgroup.
As for the mutli-browsers capability support, generally the most asp.net
server controls just emit the standard html4.0 content and the scripts code
are also limited to the common scripts supported by most browsers. So there
won't have very much difference on the HTML UI displaying between those
most popular browsers. And the most browser compatibility problems occurs
on dealing with scripting model since each browser has different extent on
the supporing the DOM or other client behavior model. Here are some
articles about asp.net's browser capability:

#Cross-Browser Compatibility
http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/using/migrating/phpmig/whitepapers/compati
bility.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/01/ASPColumn/default.aspx

Also, in whidbey version, the new Adapter based webcontrols may help make
multi-browser webcontrols development more convenient.

Thanks & Regards,

Steven Cheng
Microsoft Online Support

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