Web-Design for Compatibility
From Hackers-IL
Contents |
Why is it important to support non-MSIE browsers
- The "minority does not count" mantra that may persuade you to discriminate against non-Microsoft Internet Explorer users is not healthy.
- You reject an entire (and growing) population who knows better than to choose IE.
- You are also aware that your site is dysfunctional and non-standards-compliant.
- This is bad in itself and may indicate that it would not function into the future. (you don't expect that everybody will use MSIE 6.0 forever).
- Users who browse in non-PC mediums (celular phones, lynx, scripts) will have problems.
- People with disabilities - good for publicity.
Why is it important to Keep your site Standards Compliant
- By validating your pages you make sure the structure of the document is acceptable to standards-compliant browsers.
- When you deviate from the standard, you don't know how the browser is going to react.
Saying that "I don't know if my site is standards compliant or not, but it looks good in all browsers." (or just in one browser and one platform on which it was tested) is not a good idea.
- The browsers may not display this page correctly in future versions, or a new browser may do things differently.
- (For instance, when MSIE 5.0 came, it was more standards-compliant than MSIE 4.x and as a result many sites that worked with IE before became broken. This happened in the release of MSIE 6.0, and in Windows XP Service Pack 2, as well.)
- The browser has a tough job as it is, so you shouldn't make it tougher by sending it mal-formed input.
- The Semantic Web.
- Site Management Tools - they often would be confused on non-standard HTML.
Caveats
- Standards-compliance is not a panacea.
- Even if all the output from the site is standards-compliant it doesn't mean it will display correctly.
- This is either because of bugs in the browsers, or because you haven't done the right thing.
- So, it is important to test the pages in as many browsers as possible, in addition to validating them.
Why it is Important to keep your site Free of Unnecessary Embellishments
- One can write standards-compliant sites that are full of Javascript games, Dynamic HTML, and other monsters like that. It is usually a bad idea.
- Getting Javascript code to work properly on all browsers is more difficult than getting a static HTML to do so. (or at least it can never be easier).
- Most Javascript code is unnecessary. It adds more gizmos to the site, but not more functionality.
- By adding unnecessary embellishments to the site, you make them more prone to browser bugs, and mis-features; you make the site harder (and more costy) to maintain and you usually don't add much to the user experience to be worth it.
- An extreme example of this are pages that use HTML 4.x markup without any CSS or other visual embelishments. If you do this, I guarantee you that your portability problems are over.
- ( I wouldn't recommend this extreme, because it will make your pages quite boring, but it still illustrates a point. )
