Over the course of the past several months, while researching to get our site up and running, we ran into several issues. Many of the sites I visited did not display properly in Firefox. Firefox is my browser of choice. It is far more capable than Internet Explorer. Many of the features the current version of Internet Explorer has were previously released in Firefox. And with extensions you can get Firefox to do almost everything except wash the dishes!

With all of this capability why is it that many MLS websites or Real Estate website fail to display properly when using Firefox. In a few short words, they moist likely are not XHTML compliant. But why should I care about XHTML? It is because documents conforming to XHTML 1.0 will be more likely to interoperate within and among various XHTML environments.

If you are managing your own site use the XHTML validator to check your sites compliance. If you are trying to access a website that refuses to work properly with your browser of choice, check for it’s level of compliance. If a site is compliant it is allowed to display one of these two symbols:

or

If it doesn’t then send an email to the webmaster asking why not!

While having compliant code does not guarantee that a site will appear exactly the same in all browsers, it goes a long ways into making that a reality. The same goes for some small errors. A site might display several errors on a page but may appear to work properly in all browser environments. If the standard is followed there is a better chance that it will not only look the same but behave the same also.