Making design compatible with older browsers

[Tristan Perry]

Hello,
I'm currently working on re-designing my website. The design I have, worked great in all of the modern browsers I had tested it in (Firefox 1, IE 6, Netscape 8, Opera 8 ) However I tested my website in Opera 6 and IE 4, 5 and 5.5 and noticed that the text was too big. I was using "font-size: small;" for my text. I changed that value to "font-size: 80%" and now it works pretty much fine in all browsers I have. My question is this: Is there any major disadvantage to using 80% instead of small? I've looked at other websites in the older browsers I mentioned above, but the text is fine, even though "font-size: small;" is used (I tested it on my SMF forum by the way) Is there any reason for this that I'm missing?
Thanks,
Tau Online

P.S.: This will probably seem like a stupid question, but I'm going to ask anyway. Is there anyway to see what your website would look like on Safari without buying a Mac? I know there are websites that show you what your website looks like in a few other browsers and so I thought it wouldn't hurt to ask!

[[Unknown]]

but the text is fine, even though "font-size: small;" is used (I tested it on my SMF forum by the way) Is there any reason for this that I'm missing?

It's used to the text size changing will work in Internet Explorer.  It's dynamically generated, and this is what fonts-compat.css is for.

P.S.: This will probably seem like a stupid question, but I'm going to ask anyway. Is there anyway to see what your website would look like on Safari without buying a Mac? I know there are websites that show you what your website looks like in a few other browsers and so I thought it wouldn't hurt to ask!

Konqueror is the closest you can get... for Linux.

-[Unknown]

[Tristan Perry]

but the text is fine, even though "font-size: small;" is used (I tested it on my SMF forum by the way) Is there any reason for this that I'm missing?

It's used to the text size changing will work in Internet Explorer.  It's dynamically generated, and this is what fonts-compat.css is for.

P.S.: This will probably seem like a stupid question, but I'm going to ask anyway. Is there anyway to see what your website would look like on Safari without buying a Mac? I know there are websites that show you what your website looks like in a few other browsers and so I thought it wouldn't hurt to ask!

Konqueror is the closest you can get... for Linux.

-[Unknown]

Ok thanks  So SMF font sizes are controlled by fonts.compact.css? Sorry but your reply confused me a bit 

[[Unknown]]

It sends fonts-compat.css only to certain browsers.  Unfortunately, this is more difficult to do with plain HTML, and you usually have to resort to ugly hacks.

-[Unknown]

[Tristan Perry]

It sends fonts-compat.css only to certain browsers.  Unfortunately, this is more difficult to do with plain HTML, and you usually have to resort to ugly hacks.

-[Unknown]

Ah right, thanks  I'll probably use a server-side solution for the fonts issue then. *Searches for an article on dual booting with linux* 

[rudoka]

   Right now I'm using both Windows and Linux, on both of them Firefox.
   The funniest thing is that there are webpages that look different on linux in spite of the fact that I'm using the same browser.
    Yes, mostly it is the text of the sites that are extremely small in linux, and I couldn't figure it out why. Changing the system fonts does not seem to affect how the pages are displayed. This is really annoying because sometimes some text is so small that I can't even read. And yet, there are sites that appear the same in both OS-es.
   
    I couldn't figure it out yet what's causing this behaviour of Firefox+Linux. This makes me to think to go and take a look in Konqueror. Let's see what happens there.

    Probably it's something CSS related, but who knows. 

Rudolf