If I develop webpages to ie8 will they render correctly in ie6 ?

Question

I have developer toolbar, any other tools I am missing ?

I am not doing any fancy graphics/html 5.

I have just been told I need to a support ie8; so want to know if I need to test in both, or just ie8.

Have used ms superpreview, but this is only good for static sites - I am developig a large data driven jsp website. and as far as I can see there is not any easy way to test on both ie6 ie8, without using a separate machine (albeit virtual).

edit Will ietester remove my standard ie install (I want to keep developer toolbar). ietest will enable me to test under both, and then develop usign developer toolbar in whichever is my browser (ie6/ie8)

Answer 1

You'll need to test in both. IE6 renders pages in a vastly different manner than IE7 or IE8.

Answer 2

Simple answer: NO.

you will need to test in all browsers you support as they all have differences to some degree. IE6 is terrible at rendering css correctly.

you can use a tool called IETester to view your site in multiple version of IE although you wont have developer toolbar support. The other solution is to have different version on an windows image in a virtual machine.

The best way to develope a site is to develope it in a browser with the best support of css. (firefox, chrome, etc). Once you have done that then start adding browser specific fixes for browsers which do not display correctly. Have a look at this article for how to setup your css file structure CSS

Answer 3

IE6 one of the most dumbest browser and biggest pain for both designer and developer. There is no guarantee that your site will work in both IE8 and IE6. As for checking you can use the IE Tester software which is free. Some even say that we should stop considering IE6 :)

Answer 4

No. You're in for a world of pain :)

Answer 5

Definitely not. If you need a page / site to work properly in IE6 then develop for that. More often than not a page that works in IE6 will work in everything else.

IE6 in particular is terrible with it's calculations regarding spacing, especially where padding is involved.

Answer 6

IE6 doesn't support HTML5 and CSS 3. In essence, your IE8 markups may not render well (in fact, many won't work at all) on IE6 (unless you do some CSS hack for IE).

If you want your system to work in both IE6 and IE8, test your system on both browser versions and make visual adjustments (CSS, HTML markup, etc.) accordingly.

Answer 7

Test in both browsers on all systems possible.

Answer 8

Short answer: You cannot just code in IE8, you will need to test in IE6, too.

It's a very strange request to start coding only for those two browsers. Are you absolutely sure that's what you want? For example, what about IE7 or IE9? If you DO want to make your site as compatible as possible, in as many browsers as possible, you should make your site Standards Compliant (e.g. HTML 4 or XHTML).

Even if you don't, it's definitely where I'd start if I was going to focus on just IE6 and IE8. Unfortunately, IE6 will still likely give you trouble, but making your HTML/CSS standards compliant will make it easier a lot to ensure compatibility with IE8.

Tip to remember in IE6: If things aren't lining up exactly the way you imagine, it might be a carriage return in your HTML (yes, IE6 doesn't always ignore them *facepalm*).

Edit: Ah, corporate logic. I see.