Viewable in Any Browser campain: comments, feedback

[Gérard Talbot]

I personally disagree with the Viewable in Any browser campain. The site
is frankly outdated, seems to be no longer maitained, has several
recommendations that don't make a lot of sense anymore. In my mind, it
is much more important to code according to standards (valid markup and
CSS code) and good coding practices (tableless design, graceful
degradation, etc.) than to code according to the lower common
denominator among browsers.

Let's face it: there is pretty much no one anymore who uses MSIE 4 or NS
4.x. We are already in the era of Firefox 1.5, NS 8.x, MSIE 7 and Opera
8.5. An unanimity of sources indicate that MSIE 5.x is now used less
than Firefox 1.x (eg: world-wide stats of August 2005:
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2005/August/browser.php ).
Some marginal browsers are no longer being maintained either while some
other marginal browsers (e.g Icab 3, Amaya 9.x) are being upgraded to
support fully HTML 4.01, CSS 2.1 and DOM 1.

In that spirit, I stumble across other campains which I think make a lot
more sense and are more proactive, useful for the web in general:

- Any modern browser: http://merri.net/anymodernbrowser.shtml
- Browse Happy: http://browsehappy.com/
- Alternative Browser Alliance: http://www.alternativebrowseralliance.com/
- Table free campain: http://www.workingwith.me.uk/tablefree/why/

Gérard
--
remove blah to email me

[Gérard Talbot]

Darin McGrew a écrit :

Gérard Talbot <ne***********@ gtalbot.org> wrote:

By the way, Darin, did you get my email... regarding the update of WDG
Web Authoring FAQ Updated ? sent on 2005-09-18. Just asking...

Yes, and I've incorporated some of the suggestions already. Specific,
noncontroversia l suggestions are easy to incorporate quickly.

Great! Just great! I see you've incorporated many changes, improvements.

One typo:
Section 5.11:
"Note that the FOO element is deprecated by HTML 4."
should be
Note that the &lt;font&gt; element is deprecated by HTML 4.
or
Note that the FONT element is deprecated by HTML 4.
Others get added to various "to do" and "to research" lists, and will take
longer. For example, I plan to replace deprecated presentational markup
examples with CSS, and proprietary DOM examples with the standard DOM.
Great!

And at some point, I'll include a "No Longer Frequently Asked Questions" page
with the entries that I've deleted from the FAQ.

I will link the WDG Web Authoring FAQ into
"Using Web Standards in Your Web Pages"
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-deve...upgrade_2.html
and into my website at
Website design resources for beginner and intermediate Nvu users
http://www.gtalbot.org/NvuSection/Nv...Resources.html

Gérard
--
remove blah to email me

[Chris Morris]

Gérard Talbot <ne***********@ gtalbot.org> writes:

Chris Morris a écrit :

Well, I agree with your general comment that AnyBrowser is a little
unmaintained, and some of the advice (commenting Javascript code) is
out of date, and other bits would benefit from updating to discuss
more recent compatibility issues and more stylesheet issues.
Still, if you do reasonable quality code and remember to hide complex
CSS from older browsers (@import method, usually) then you can support
NS4/IE4 in the same way you support Lynx - content without styling -
without really needing to worry about it much.

I don't use the @import method but I do test my pages with CSS
disabled to see if content can still be accessed, is still readable
and if navigation is still functional. This is a checkpoint in the
WCAG list.
I also view/try those pages with Lynx 2.8.5. I never test my pages
with NS 4.x nor IE4/IE5.

The problem isn't so much CSS-disabled as CSS-randomly-interpreted,
which NS4/IE4/IE5 have a habit of doing. Using the right @import hack
means you don't need to worry about NS4 and IE4, which would make the
worst mess of things, and so don't really have to test in those if you
also test in Lynx. IE5, while a falling minority, I think *is* worth
testing in for at least the next year or so. IE5/Mac probably for even
longer.

--
Chris

[Darin McGrew]

Gérard Talbot <ne***********@ gtalbot.org> wrote:

Great! Just great! I see you've incorporated many changes, improvements.

One typo:

Thanks. It's fixed now.

Also, the FAQ is now HTML 4.01 Strict. Now I just need to update all the
answers and examples to match. :-/

What's the best standards-oriented replacement for <base target="_top">?
--
Darin McGrew, mc****@stanford alumni.org, http://www.rahul.net/mcgrew/
Web Design Group, da***@htmlhelp. com, http://www.HTMLHelp.com/

"It's bad luck to be superstitious."

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Darin McGrew <mc****@stanfor dalumni.org> wrote:

What's the best standards-oriented replacement for <base target="_top">?

None. Keep it. It should do no harm, and it may marginally help against
framers.

Formally, it's deprecated markup. In essence, it follows the spirit, if not
the letter, by fighting against framing, with the tools we have.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

[Guy Macon]

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit

Gérard Talbot wrote:

I don't use the @import method but I do test my pages with CSS disabled
to see if content can still be accessed, is still readable and if
navigation is still functional. This is a checkpoint in the WCAG list.
I also view/try those pages with Lynx 2.8.5. I never test my pages with
NS 4.x nor IE4/IE5.

I figure that anyone who still uses NS4 is used to having large
portions of the web be unusable.

I don't test my pages with NS4 or IE4, and plan on stopping my testing
with IE5 sometime soon, but I always test with both lynx and links.

Another test which I find to be very useful is with the latest IE
with all features such as images and jsvascript turned off, security
set to the highest setting, and accessibility set to ignore the site's
choice of fonts, colors, and CSS. Quite eye-opening...
Links about Links and Lynx:
http://world.std.com/~adamg/dehanced.html
http://lynx.browser.org/
http://links.sourceforge.net/
http://freshmeat.net/projects/links/
http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html
http://home24.inet.tele.dk/ccadams/se/lynx.html
http://lynx.isc.org/lynx2.8.5/index.html
http://www.subir.com/lynx.html