Web standards

The W3C icons on this page and the home page mean that all of the pages on this site conform to the formal standards for HTML version 4.01 and CSS. Why is this important?

The chances are that you’re viewing this page using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) web browser. IE comes with Windows, but doesn’t support standards well. If you’re using IE, this lack of standards support won’t really affect you: because of IE’s dominance, all web authors try to make sure that their sites appear correctly in IE. Some even use Microsoft’s web authoring tools, which ‘enhance’ the HTML standard with Microsoft’s own proprietary features. Sites written in this way won’t display properly in other browsers.

If Microsoft defined the standards this would be fine. However, it doesn’t. Also, despite Microsoft’s huge share of the market for operating systems (and hence for web browsers), Windows is not the only operating system available. Significant numbers of people use the Apple Macintosh and a whole variety of Linux and Unix-based systems. IE doesn’t run on these operating systems, so anyone who doesn’t use Windows is either locked out of certain web sites or is unable to view them correctly because of the non-standard way in which IE-specific sites are written. And there are also plenty of people using Windows who have tried other web browsers and found them superior to IE, and who would like not to be forced to use IE on certain sites.

Web standards mean that every web browser should be able to display a page written to the standards correctly. By writing to the standards, web authors can guarantee that their sites can be viewed correctly in every properly written browser.

If you see a site that says ‘Best viewed in Browser XYZ’, you can be sure that the author of that web site doesn’t understand these ideas. If you see a site that displays correctly in IE but not in another browser, then the fault lies with the site (for being IE-specific), not with the browser.

This site has been written to the W3C standards, and hence should look right in IE, Netscape, Mozilla, Safari, Firefox, Konqueror and Opera, among others. It should even be usable in text-only browsers, such as Lynx.

How this site was written

The text of the site was written using WinEdt, a shareware text editor. No fancy WYSIWYG utilities were employed – all the HTML was keyed manually.

The graphics (apart from the W3C icons) were produced using Corel Draw and Corel Photo-Paint.

The site has been tested in several versions of a variety of browsers: Internet Explorer (and derivatives such as Avant Browser and Crazy Browser), Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox (formerly Mozilla Firebird), K-Meleon, Netscape, Konqueror, Opera and Lynx. I haven’t been able to test it on the Mac, so if you find any glitches please tell me about them.

But this site’s CSS doesn’t validate!

Strictly speaking, it doesn’t. I’ve used a proprietary Mozilla/Netscape extension to CSS to create rounded corners on some of the black borders. These show up as normal square corners in non-Netscape/Mozilla browsers. Nevertheless, I’m still playing by the rules: see http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/css/properties/extensions/nsextensions.htm for an explanation.