Browser Compatibility Proves Elusive

Following several years of rapid development, during which time each new release of Internet Explorer (IE) brought with it a new API, the client side of Web application development has settled down, but has left in its wake a plethora of browser versions, APIs, and incompatibilities between versions of IE, as well as between IE and the standards set by various Internet standards bodies.

Since IE 3.0 in 1996, each version of Microsoft’s Web browser has supported one or more Document Object Models (DOMs). A DOM is an API that allows client-side code, typically written in scripting languages such as VBScript or JScript, to read (and sometimes modify) the contents of a document through an object-oriented interface. A developer using an HTML DOM, for example, could access a table through a Table object with properties such as the number of rows and columns, rather than having to parse the text of the HTML page looking for <TR> and <TD> tags that define a table’s rows and columns. Each DOM defines, in effect, an API, and browsers often support multiple DOMs.