I do cross-browser development and I don t really use any of the prescribed patterns, like cross-browser testing. I instead use a decorative pattern. Sometimes it works wonderfully, sometimes it s a headache, but that can be said for any development pattern.
Most of my development takes place in which browser I consider the most standards-compliant. I prefer WebKit to Presto, but both are generally neck and neck for standards compliance. With these browsers, proper use of HTML and CSS almost always leads to desirable results. My WebKit browser of choice is Google Chrome. Safari works too, but keep in mind that on Mac OS X the font smoothing tends to make text bigger. To ensure compatibility with sites designed for Safari Mac, Safari Win emboldens fonts, so it s not always the most pixel-perfect representation of your site.
Blueprint CSS can be a huge help if you re trying to quickly prototype a cross-browser site design. I m not convinced that such a framework is always necessary, and they can also influence the way you structure your XHTML markup, and contorting your markup to match a pre-existing CSS class hierarchy isn t always a great idea.
Once I have a design that I m happy with in my standards compliant browser, I then decorate it with bug fixes in other, less standards-compliant browsers using conditional styles or stylesheets. Firefox, at least since version 3.0, is almost never a huge issue, but there are ways of targeting Firefox specifically, and even differentiating between Gecko 1.9 and 1.8, using only CSS. It s a hack, technically, so CSS purists might scoff at the code blasphemy, but it s a reliable, usable solution. For clarity and ease of maintenance, I usually maintain my Firefox/IE fixes in isolated stylesheets and compile them with some kind of server side script, which I consider preferable to conditional include statements and JavaScript hacks. If you make use of caching with PHP, this isn t a significant bottleneck or waste of CPU time.
IETester is an indispensible tool for checking a design in all of the different IE versions, and it even uses the proper JScript engine for each release, which previous, less reliable solutions like MultipleIEs lacked.
These days, the biggest problem with cross-browser development is JavaScript, and jQuery will basically save your life here. As someone who maintained a sizable JavaScript framework for a corporate website in the days before AJAX and JavaScript interfaces, so there s no limit to the amount of praise I can give for jQuery/Prototype/Dojo.
