BIJIT - BVICAM’s International Journal of Information Technology Bharati Vidyapeeth’s Institute of Computer Applications and Management (BVICAM), New Delhi (INDIA) Copy Right © BIJIT – 2015; January - June, 2015; Vol. 7 No. 1; ISSN 0973 – 5658 815 Comparative Study of Cross Browser Compatibility as Design Issue in Various Websites Jatinder Manhas Submitted in February, 2014; Accepted in November, 2014 Abstract - In this current era of information technology websites are very important means of communication. Lot of efforts is required by different institutions / organizations to portray complete information on beautifully designed websites. Websites act as an online agent through which a user can get his work done without physically visiting the organizations. Website design is given with a very critical look by the designer so that it can provide users with all the facilities of the concerned institutions / organizations online. To make websites behavior similar in all the different browsers employed by the different categories of the users, the responsibility of the designer and the concerned institutions / organizations increases manifold. In this research paper author developed an online tool using .NET Framework using C# to study cross browser compatibility as Design issue in various categories of the websites like Job portals, Government, educational, Commercial and Social networking. The automated tool developed by author function on the basis of the different standards prescribed in W3C guidelines document UAAG 2.0 [7] and act like a parser and renders the complete code of the website and produces result on basis of the behavior of the websites in five most popular and widely used Browsers like parameters like Internet Explorer[7,8,9], Chrome, Safari, Fire fox. Each Browser is tested on the basis of the five parameters which are included in the parser are Blinking, Active X control, Website Resolution; image Formats, HTML Tag errors. The results obtained after testing five different categories of websites shows that educational and social networking sites shows least compatibility in multiple browsers where as job portals, commercial and government websites shows 100% compliance to the website design standards recommended by W3C w.r.t browser compatibility of different websites on different browsing platform. Key words: Websites, Browser, Compatibility, Design, .NE, Automated Tool. 1.0 INTRODUCTION Website is a combination of interlinked and related web pages residing on a single server and severed to the user through single domain. There are different categories and wide variety Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Bhaderwah Campus, University of Jammu, Jammu and Kashmir, INDIA. E-mail: manhas.jatinder@gmail.com of the websites available these days, but the most widely accessible categories of the websites include social networking, Commercial, Government, Educational and job portals. With the advancement in technologies and completions of providing all services to the citizen online, it has become mandatory as well as very important for different organizations (big or small) to develop website for rendering all its services online to the user at global level through networks. In order to provide better services online the websites are increasing in number in a very short span of time. With increase in the number of websites its popularity and cater to the need of all the different categories of the users it becomes mandatory for different organizations to put lot of efforts to design websites carefully so that it can easily be accessible for different services. Number of different websites design issues is there which needs to be kept into designers consideration while designing websites. Browser compatibility is one of the most important issues among all websites design parameters. These days multiple browsers are being practiced by the different users for accessing websites. With the advent of multiple browsers it becomes mandatory for a website to behave similar when open in multiple browsers. There are different organizations which are responsible for development and recommendations of different website design standards. For evaluating website design as per the different standards so that it behave similar in all the different browsers available, the number of different automated tools are available online. Each available online tool test the websites on its own criteria and supply the result accordingly. In order to test the websites design (Browser compatibility) w.r.t. the standards recommended by W3C, the automated tool is design and developed by taking into consideration the parameters which are not tested by any automated tool available online till date. The automated tool, developed shall take website URL as input and then parse the website complete code supplied by the server after submitting the desired request through its interface. The HTML code supplied by the server will be compared with the existing standards recommended by the W3C and embedded in the automated tool for its compliance. The working of the automated tool design and developed by the author is given below in Figure 1.The parser of the automated tool will take website URL as input and send same to the server as request for fetching the websites HTML code. The server within no time sends back the HTML code of the website to the interface of the automated tool for its comparison with the existing standards. The algorithm of the online automated tool developed by the author is given below: Algorithm 1: To determine browser compatibility of a