Author’s note: This article was originally posted at Frye / Wiles, and has been re-posted here for consolidation.
When we talk about topics such about CSS, JavaScript, and sometimes even certain image formats (png24, I’m looking at you), and how they render in a client’s browser, we always, or should always also consider cross-browser behavior. This behavior entails many things: CSS rendering, the availability of CSS specific attributes, whether or not the DOM interface will be the same, general JavaScript behavior — the list goes on and on. And, since most discussions about CSS and JavaScript (at least the ones that I am having) also concern this variable nature, I’m coining (maybe I’m the first) a new term to put all of this into a handy little phrase, “Cross-Browser Consistency,” or, in typical programmer fashion, simply, “XBC.”
Let’s take a brief moment to establish a more exact meaning for this phrase. As you may well be aware, the industry commonly talks about cross-browser support, so we’ll differentiate between support and consistency, as well as defining what cross-browser really means, and some other tidbits as to boot.