Background The history of cross-browser is involved with the history of the "
browser wars" in the late 1990s between
Netscape Navigator and
Microsoft Internet Explorer as well as with that of
JavaScript and
JScript, the first scripting languages to be implemented in the web browsers. Netscape Navigator was the most widely used web browser at that time and Microsoft had licensed
Mosaic to create
Internet Explorer 1.0. New versions of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer were released at a rapid pace over the following few years. Due to the intense competition in the web browser market, the development of these browsers was fast-paced and new features were added without any coordination between vendors. The introduction of new features often took priority over bug fixes, resulting in unstable browsers, fickle web standards compliance, frequent crashes and many security holes.
Creation of W3C and Web standardization The
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), founded in 1994 to promote open standards for the
World Wide Web, pulled
Netscape and
Microsoft together with other companies to develop a standard for browser scripting languages called
ECMAScript. The first version of the standard was published in 1997. Subsequent releases of JavaScript and JScript would implement the ECMAScript standard for greater cross-browser compatibility. After the standardization of ECMAScript, W3C began work on the standardization of
Document Object Model (DOM), which is a way of representing and interacting with objects in
HTML,
XHTML and
XML documents. DOM Level 0 and DOM Level 1 were introduced in 1996 and 1997. Only limited supports of these were implemented by the browsers, as a result, non-conformant browsers such as
Internet Explorer 4.x and Netscape 4.x were still widely used as late as 2000. DOM Standardization became popular since the introduction of DOM Level 2, which was published in 2000. It introduced the "getElementById" function as well as an event model and support for XML namespaces and
CSS. DOM Level 3, the current release of the DOM specification, published in April 2004, added support for
XPath and
keyboard event handling, as well as an interface for serializing documents as XML. By 2005, large parts of W3C DOM were well-supported by common ECMAScript-enabled browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer,
Opera,
Safari and
Gecko-based browsers (like
Firefox,
SeaMonkey and
Camino).
21st century In the early part of the century, practices such as
browser sniffing were deemed unusable for cross-browser scripting. The term "multi-browser" was coined to describe applications that relied on browser sniffing or made otherwise invalid assumptions about run-time environments, which at the time were almost invariably Web browsers. The term "cross-browser" took on its currently accepted meaning at this time, as applications that once worked in Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 4 and had since become unusable in modern browsers could not reasonably be described as "cross-browser". Colloquially, such multi-browser applications, as well as frameworks and libraries, are still referred to as cross-browser. == References ==