HTML Help: Browser Display Inconsistencies

• You could have a coding error, such as incorrect syntax. If your page is displayed in "quirks" mode a browser can only display the page as it interprets it. Different browsers will interpret the error in different ways.
• You could have gotten ahold of some proprietary (non-standard) code that only works in one browser (or offshoots of that browser). Colored scrollbars is a good example of that.
• You may have valid HTML and CSS that different browsers interpret differently. For example, the specifications are not clear as to what should be done with a string of   character entities that many WYSIWYG HTML editors use to create white space. Some browsers will collapse them to a single space; others will render one space per character entity.
• If your web site's server is misconfigured and sends an incorrect MIME type, Internet Explorer will ignores server-provided MIME types, so sometimes that works out to your advantage as far as displaying your page goes.

  Other browsers use the server-provided MIME types, which reveals the server misconfigurations that prevent your page from displaying correctly. This includes external style sheets, which should be sent as "text/css".

• You could have encountered a browser bug. At the time of this writing, most browsers are still not 100 percent standards compliant. It often helps to include closing tags that technically are optional.

  For example:

  </p>, </li>,  </td>, </tr>, </option> and others.
  

• If you're viewing the site from two different computers, different user settings in the browser preferences could change the display.