Update your site to web standards

Today, users can choose from a variety of modern web browsers, including Windows Internet Explorer. In order to take advantage of the rich capabilities of most modern-day web browsers, while continuing to provide a satisfactory experience on older browsers, design your websites using features based on established standards, such as HTML5, Cascading Style Sheets, Level 3 (CSS3), and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). This section highlights topics that help you update your site to web standards.

In this section

Topic Description

Enable web standards support

Internet Explorer supports a variety of established and emerging standards, such as HTML5, CSS3, SVG, and others.

Investigate document mode issues

This topic helps you learn how to use the F12 developer tools to research and identify a problem related to the document type of a webpage.

Detect features instead of browsers

This article shows how to use feature detection to verify support for standards-based featured and demonstrates different ways to detection features effectively.

Create an effective fallback strategy

This article shows how to create effective strategies that allow webpages to display correctly when viewed with web browsers that do not support features defined by stable, widely supported standards.

Review the compatibility cookbooks

The Internet Explorer Compatibility Cookbooks provide information about changes to Internet Explorer, including new features, changed features, and features that have been superceded or replaced. New topics will be added as features are modified and as user feedback identifies areas where more information is needed.

 

To prepare your site for web standards

Learn the basics:

To troubleshoot issues:

It's one thing to recognize that you need to create standards-enabled websites, but another to know how to do that, especially if you're used to older techniques and processes.

See Also