While CSS is quite useful for taking the basic to the aesthetic, it does have some browser issues, especially with the various types of computer systems and browsers.
What are some known technical issues with Web browsers and CSS?
Fonts: There is a limited amount of fonts to pick from that are available by default in both the Windows and OS X systems (Castro & Hyslop). As a result, pages can often be rendered in other fonts than you've programmed in your .CSS document. Some of the ways you can combat this issue is to have font alternates in your .CSS document. Alternatively, you can load web fonts so that the document is displayed in exactly the same font on all computer system and browsers. However, these web fonts adds to the file size that browsers need to download. This can affect the performance of the webpage (Castro & Hyslop).
Color: While many browsers support color types such as the RGB & HEX types, it doesn't always do so for certain color types such as the HSLA color type. For example, internet explorer (IE) does not support HSLA, HSL, RGBA at least not until the IE9 iteration. Therefore, to reach a larger audience, one would have to define fall back colors for older versions of IE (Castro & Hyslop).
Screen Display: Due to the proliferation of mobile websites, repulsive design as opposed to a fixed width browser display is now the norm. If a font-size has been set with pixel size (px) as opposed to ems and percentages (%), users will not be able to make the text bigger or smaller using the browser text resize option if they're using IE8 or earlier versions (Castro & Hyslop).
While CSS can make thing more vividly interesting by increasing aesthetics, one should be aware of these kinds of issues and make moves to fix them. Castro & Hyslop recommend resetting or normalizing default styles to level the playing field across all browsers. Resetting a browser's default style sheet changes all style elements to '0' thereby allowing your own style sheet to reign supreme. They recommend using Eric Meyer's style sheet to reset default browser styles.
Normalizing default browser setting mean that the browser default setting are tweaked to make it consistent across browsers.They recommend using Nicolas Gallager and Jonathan Neal's style sheet to normalize default browser styles. These are just 2 examples of stylesheets that are out there on the web.
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