The Safari development team at Apple has made a dedicated effort to implement Web standards. This means that the easiest way to ensure optimal rendering of your pages in Safari is by following the standards. Doing so will also guarantee optimal rendering in Mozilla, Opera and Internet Explorer for Macintosh. Of course, each of these browsers has its own minor quirks or legitimate differences of interpretation, so testing your site in all of them is still mandatory.
By comparison, Internet Explorer for Windows—the most popular browser for the Windows OS—often requires web developers to use a number of non-standard tricks or to accept layout differences. This situation is unlikely to change anytime soon, so for now, web developers have to work around these problems.
This article gives some practical hints on how to create standards-conforming websites, and to work around some of issues that will arise for Explorer for Windows.
Before you start coding your website you must make a few decisions—which DOCTYPE do you use? Do you use pure CSS, or CSS with Minimal Tables? We'll discuss these topics, and then go into some design guidelines and issues to consider with XHTML and CSS.