I'm finally making a page for most browsers by using HTTP_USER_AGENT, and I need to know what I should be looking for to display text-only, tables and font tags, and CSS? I figured I'd special case text only and tables, and let everything else be CSS, so as new browsers come out, I don't have to update the list. And no, my host doesn't support get_browser(); My client wants to reach as broad an audience as possible, otherwise I'd just CSS it all. Thanks!
w3schools should have all the info you need. The statistics makes for pretty comprehencive reading, and clicking on one of their three browser types on that index page gives you a run down of the browsers capabilities, or lack their of as progressive versions jumped in to the fray.
Forget about trying to figure out what browser you are facing... Go the CSS route, learn about the major hacks (e.g. IE Box model hack etc), and build your pages. The trick is to build pages such that if some or all CSS is not available the page degrades gracefully... that is, the content is still displayed minus some or all of the styling... I'd love to point you to an all-in-one tutorial that covered this but I dont know of one. IMHO you should build the page with CSS, test on the newer browsers, if OK, test on older browsers, and tweak so that at least the visitor gets the information if not the whole 'experience'. CJM
As cjmwork2 said, the real trick is to use CSS in such a way that if it's not supported then the page is still viewable and usable. Take a quick look at a design I've done that uses XHTML and CSS (http://phlux.co.uk/sstest/) in a few browsers, it should be usable in practically anything. A good example I've used on there is that I redefined some list element properties for the menu links so they display nicely in a row at the top in modern browsers, but in say Lynx they degrade to a normal list of links.