Warning: what follows may be considered boring by some readers - especially non-geeks (if there are any).
Ladies and gentlemen, actsofvolition.com is now compliant with the The World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) HTML 4.01 Transitional recommendation*.
The good people at The Web Standards Project can explain why adhering to standards matters.
Those who work in web development will know that adhering to these standards is not always easy since some popular browsers don't interpret them correctly. Netscape 4.x, for example, will have problems rendering a perfectly standards compliant page. Web developers must choose between breaking the standards or having glitches for Netscape 4.x users.
New browsers are much better at interpreting the standards. Internet Explorer 4, 5, 5.5, and 6 all do a decent job and have gotten better and better with each new version (although there are still problems. The new Mozilla browser (aka Netscape 6.x) does an excellent job as do most other alternative browsers such as Opera, iCab, and Konqueror.
The trouble is that loads of people still use Netscape 4.x. While global stats put it's usage at below 10% of web users, this site and others I help produce have up to 30% of users running Netscape 4.x.
Here on aov, I can (and have) decide to screw Netscape 4.x users in favour of the standards. There are better browsers that are easy to get. However, as a professional web developer (which I am, apparently) I can not make that decision on behalf of my clients. Company XYZ is interested in selling their widget, not ensuring web accessibility and cross-platform-interoperability. Ignoring users is not good business. That said, it is possible to make sites that adhere to the standards (for the most part) and still work relatively well in NS4.x.
Exciting, isn't it?
* If you actually run our site through the W3C's Validator, you'll notice that it doesn't actually validate, but that's only because it's a little confused about some of our URLs and some non-standard characters, which I'm working on.
Comments
MoJoPiN - October 30, 2001 5:26 am
ha! *
T.Ethridge - October 30, 2001 5:44 am
Not to disagree, but there <b>are</b> non-geek readers of your Web site. Which begs the question, whatever happened to Mr. Dorrell?
Alan - October 30, 2001 6:45 am
I apparently should be embarrassed and consider myself NS4.x twerp. Things overlap, edges aren't in line. Looks worse...but these changes were preceeded by an announcement confirming my failure in the process. Why can't Canada Post take this internet thing over? It's so right for them.
Steven Garrity - October 30, 2001 9:05 am
T.Ethridge, <a href="index.cfm?name=matthew">Matt's</a> busy as the editor the of The Cadre, UPEI's student newspaper. His writtings are also occasionally found at ForgetMagazine.com.
Darcy Aiken - October 30, 2001 2:06 pm
Nice work. The Netscape 4.x people shouldn't be able to hold everyone else back...
Jevon MacDonald - October 30, 2001 7:01 pm
New K-Melon release... T'is a rockin'
Steven Garrity - October 30, 2001 7:07 pm
Good call Jevon. I just downloaded it. K-Meleon is becoming a real viable alternative to Internet Explorer.
Netscape 6.2 was released today as well. However, while Netscape 6.2 is based on Mozilla version 0.9.4, the latest K-Meleon release is based on the new 0.9.5 Mozilla build.
These browsers are a big win for the standards. I've read estimates that as much of 30% of web development budgets can be lost to multiple-browser fixes. This number seems high in my experience, but it is definitly a waste.
Jevon MacDonald - October 30, 2001 9:51 pm
Heh,. Probably 30% of the DHTML budgets.. ;)
The power of open source development is being seen more often and in more interesting ways. Projects like Mozilla are quite amazing when you consider what is being accomplished, and how.<br><br>
On another note:
Say (to quote from steve) <i><b>"These browsers are a big win for the standards."</b></i> in a football announcers voice. It's funny. I thought anyway.