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First, get written specifications from a town official who has the authority to approve the results. The specifications should indicate the sources of content and how the town expects the Web site to be hosted. The specifications should be testable; that is, it should be possible to determine whether or not the result indeed implements what was wanted. You definitely do not want to put in any effort that will then be rejected. If you get a negative response, you want to point to the specification as justification for what you created.

Second, read what experts have said about proper Web design. The most important thing is to adhere to W3C specifications; see http://www.w3.org/. That way, any problems by end-users in viewing the result can be attributed to the users' browsers and not to your creation. Also peruse Jacob Nielsen's Web site at http://www.useit.com/, especially his http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html and http://www.useit.com/homepageusability/guidelines.html. While the Viewable with Any Browser Campaign at http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/index.html is somewhat dated, much of it is still relevant. Finally, there are my own "Professional" Web Developers at http://www.rossde.com/internet/Webdevelopers.html (where I dissect the errors committed by professional Web developers) and My Web Page Design Criteria at http://www.rossde.com/internet/web_design.html (where I describe how I design my own Web pages). In my "Professional" Web Developers, pay special attention to Accessibility to make sure you do not violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. My two Web pages that I cite here contain links to external Web sites with more information that may prove quite valuable.

Third, test your results. Use the W3C validators. Use http://validator.w3.org/ to make sure you have no HTML/XHTML errors. Use http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ to make sure you have not CSS errors.

They're only discontinuing support for OLDER versions of these browsers. The summary almost makes it seem like Google will only support Google Chrome.

I don't blame 'em - it's bad enough to have to cross-develop for multiple browsers, cross-developing for current and past versions of older browsers literally doubles the difficulty involved - especially where an older version doesn't supply some critical functionality (like HTML5).

Yep. Developing stuff for every browser is a pain -- that's why our company could never get on the "Works with any Browser" campaign. Sure, just follow standards -- Yeah, that would have worked if MS did too, instead of trying to "embrace, extend and extinguish". Also: Something about a time to cash ratio of 1.

I have never understood why people love to shoot themselves in the foot by targeting browsers with weird hacks. Just use the common ground that all browsers support. Design additional elements so that the browser can degrade smoothly to something simpler if it does not support them -- This degradability is not well understood or practiced by the average web developer in my eyes.

Flash is *not* a W3C standard -> Flash is *not* part of the Web.
In no way does Flash match the definition of the Web from Tim Berners-Lee, which is information to *anyone*.
http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/

Anything calling itself a "website" that has flash inside should be charged with false claims.

Besides even on XP, flash sux (both the cpu and itself):
http://revolf.free.fr/img/why_I_banned_flash.png
http://revolf.free.fr/img/why_flash_sux_even_on_linux.png

Any time I find a site that only works properly with IE, I send them an email (if I can find contact info) pointing them to Viewable with any browser. There's never been a good reason not to make sites that don't work equally well no matter what browser you use, and, quite frankly, I'm tired of hearing about "but I've got to do it this way for IE." If you must do something special for IE, do it after you have it working in a Real Browser, not instead.

flash is not a standard. it's closed source, so not available everywhere, and unaccessible, unindexable... exactly what the web is not supposed to be.
cf. http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/
Sorry no, gnash or swfdec are not there yet, besides, whoever looked at porting them must have noticed they aren't portable despite being opensource, dependancy hell here I come. Just check the never finished BeOS port of gnash. I don't see silverlight being better anytime soon.
At least Java is open now, so it can be ported.
But it's not accessible to blind people for ex.

Why don't they make websites instead ?

Back in the bad old days when the 56KB shaping you are dropped down to was the top end, I did indeed use Lynx. But from a shell account at my ISP (surely at a university there's a Linux system you can log onto with ssh). Therefore the download to my system was only the opening screen... the remainder of the download went to my ISP host, which was high speed and at no charge. For most pages the first or second screen was enough to reject pages that were not going to do me any good.

I still sometimes use this trick to this day for other reasons. But I have to admit more and more pages are not friendly to anything but browsers with Javas and Flash enabled. And Web 2 stuff requires it. But,

May I put a plug in for the Viewable With Any Browser Campaign at http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/ as I believed in that before I found the campaign.

And if you don't need fancy graphics or fonts in your E-mail, there is pine/alpine text based e-mail agents. Again, less hit on your bandwidth if you run them from a shell account.

http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/

Already done.

I have predicted it on the day when Gmail introduced Firefox to the Google Pack, only to get laughed at by the Slashdot crowd. In this case it is sad to have been right but let's face it - we had it coming. And for those who are posting messages about how Micro$oft can't make a correct website - do you think that they have missed the campaign? I wish. The truth is that they are some of the most knowledgeable folks out there, even if on the evil side of our battle. Sadly the only solution is to do what we have done in the same situation with Open Office having problems with Office generating incorrect documents. We had to cripple Open Office internal file importation algorithms to the point of having tons of slow spaghetti code (take a look at the CVS sometimes) but what was the other alternative? We could have only excluded ourselves from the main stream of de facto standards. Now the Firefox team stands before the same dilemma. Let's just hope that they will solve this problem wisely and elegantly. They need our support now, for they will not get it from Redmond.

(link is an image)Any Browser .... it's close.

1. Other posters already mentioned MacIntosh and Tufte.
2. Phil Greenspun's articles: http://philip.greenspun.com/writing/
3. Any Browser Campaign: http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/ (even if your application isn't on the Web, the principles are similar, particularly for accessibility).
4. Study the Model/Controller/View pattern from the software pattern community. Sorry I don't have a specific pointer. Keep in mind that the 3-part pattern is probably a mistake for most purposes: Controller and View usually have to be combined, because the boundary changes between levels of abstraction. This pattern doesn't have to do with how the interface looks to the user, rather it has to do with structuring software so that you have a prayer of controlling the user interface part of the design. Many projects accomplish this pattern (without necessarily knowing about the pattern idea) by organizing work into a function library and a user interface exercising that library.
5. A key principle (not sure where it's documented) is orthogonality. At some level of design (definitely at the library level), it's very important to identify the fundamental operations that make sense conceptually (in the previous item, these are the natural operations of the Model). "Orthogonality" just means that each fundamentel operation should be essentially independent of the others. Next, make sure that you never lose access to these fundamental operations. Now, you can design combinations of operations to satisfy the most common user needs, without leaving frustrating gaps where a user with a slightly unusual need cannot perform the right operations, because they are only available in unwanted combinations.
6. Whenever you provide a level of operation that you think makes things simple for the user, try to leave some way to get a transparent view of the technical level below it, in case your notion of "simple" isn't always quite the right one. E.g., Apple screwed this principle up very badly in Garage Band, which hides the individual sound files totally from any user who relies on the Mac's views of the file system. Only through a Unix terminal interface does one discover that the "project" is a directory, with lots of files in it. An early version had a bug, in which the "Save As" button did not actually save a file. There was no way to discover this until it was too late (and I lost one of my best audition recordings to this bug, and resolved never to touch Garage Band again).
7. Which reminds me of one of the best ways to learn good interface structure: observe lots of bad examples. They are plentiful. The downside is you can spend infinite time on this survey.

usable information technology - http://www.useit.com/
any browser campaign - http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/

I am a rank-beginner at site design, but from my pouring over books to help me learn, most of the mentions of accessibility mentioned that it made it much easier to get "ranked" on search engines, because search engins read text like us, not pictures. So I added little labels to our images and got good ratings on the online disability raters like the ones I found here: http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/abtools.html#te sting

Not like it's related, but we got good ratings on Google soon after. So it didn't hurt us at all.

What I want to know is: WHY DOES TARGET WANT TO PREVENT ALL BLIND PEOPLE FROM SHOPPING ON THEIR WEBSITE? Are they just stupid? Lemme tell you, the next step after(?) a lawsuit is you'll have a hundred blind adults and kids with their canes and aide-dogs chaining closed the doors to your store. Just showing everybody else what it's like to not be allowed to shop there. You can get rid of them by sending them to jail, your choice. But you'll do it to their face, on TV, not just while they sit home on their keyboards because you figure you'll save a buck.

Kind of a pain to make it on the bus down to the actual store, but if they won't sell to me online, I guess we'll be "seeing" you in person.

This case isn't decided; I hope to hear more about it.

peace b

I can suggest that their choices are bad, but the customer is always right

Man, what's with the bleakness and the jaded talk? There is a middle ground here, don't you see? Of course, the customer is always right, but that doesn't mean that you can put in some of your own inspiration. Maybe put in a little graceful degradation here and there, a little convincing the client that he also should support blind users, or users that use a browser on a mobile phone, etc. There's some EXTRA business here and guess what: you can put in your own creativity as well.

And don't be afraid to tell them. If a client says "NO, I want it like THIS and THAT". Reply something like: "that's fine, however, our designers need some degree of freedom to be able to crank out the best designs -- I can't guarantee that everything will exactly be as you requested."

He/she should aim to be able to certify his/her site works in ANY browser. http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/

I never said code for a specific browser -- I said don't use XHTML. I'm a supporter of valid code, and the Any Browser Campaign, but I don't currently support XHTML, because there is better cross platform support for HTML4 than there is for XHTML 1, because XHTML is not directly compatable with HTML

You can write pages that will degrade gracefully under both XHTML and HTML -- but you can't write a valid XHTML page that will parse cleanly in IE, XHTML is not backwards compatable with HTML, due to the need of an XML declaration before the HTML doctype.

To get XHTML to work in browsers that don't directly support XHTML, you'll have to serve it as text/html, which can then cause problems which correctly support XHTML. more details at wikipedia.

You get better overall support in browsers by coding to HTML4.01 -- there are few advantages to the user to using XHTML 1.0 (it's easier on the browser code, that's about it). That's not true with XHTML 2, which offers better alternative text for images and objects, as well as more easily arranged sections and dramatically updated Web Forms, but I have no idea when we'll get browser support for it. (hell, we don't even have good support for CSS2, much less CSS3 in most browsers)

My web browser shows the EA home page as a plain black page. Quite innovative. Shouldn't a company's web site work with any browser? Why should I buy a new product from this company if I can expect zero support through their web site?

I have no problem with putting a 'Designed for Firefox.' button on my sites...

These are better... Really.

They are right here and here.

I agree that this is just not on. You're turning away people that are likely not technically literate enough to switch. (Otherwise they would have, yeah? ;-) It's just wrong.

I have in the past experienced problems with sites that didn't work properly (as recently as yesterday) in Opera, but worked fine in IE. The typical problem was poor web site design.

Make the web a nicer place.

I thought of that. However there were two objections:
Most of our customers use IE, and it is hard to call something easy to use when you force them to install a different browser.
I'm a great fan of Anybrowser, from back when netscape 1.1 was polluting the cross platform web. I still have not forgiven Netscape for introducing Frames and javascript - which were heavily abused in those days to lock out any other browser. (Javascript has uses, but it was mostly abused 10 years ago. Frames are evil)

I agree that IE is dangerous. However we are not in the business of recommending browsers.

Just create a website that makes heavy use of CSS2.1. Test in Firefox and Konqueror, and then put a "best view with" banner on your page. That is what got Netscape all over.

P.S. I do not endorse this. I'm a big fan of simple web sites that any browser can view. Even Mosaic 1.1 if you can find it.

from anybrowser.org:

"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."

- Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996

the same principle applies to "page[s] that [are] designed for 1600x1200 resolutions." the idea is to keep content separate from presentation - that's what CSS and XHTML and so on are supposed to enable - but that goal is impossible with crap like flash etc.

as soon as anyone puts a label on a website that says, "this site is designed for _______," it means they're locking some people (blind people, users of text browsers, PDA and cel-phone users, etc.) out of your site, and that's bad business, plus it demonstrates their ignorance of web technology.

How is saying that any better than the 1997-era "this site best viewed in X"?

"Best viewed in X Window System"? Were text mode web browsers such as Lynx still significantly popular compared to Netscape in 1997?

Oh, you mean best viewed in x, lowercase and oblique to show up as a variable name. I don't see a problem with "Best viewed with any browser that conforms to W3C recommendations".

AOL will add some proprietary plug-ins. Change the look and feel, add a new skin and you have the AOL/Netscape branded Fire Fox. However there is a possible bright side to all of this. They may contribute to the project.

There is a possible bright side even if they don't contribute anything. More people using non-MS browsers will mean that more webmasters will have to start designing portable websites with standards in mind, instead of only making sure it works in one particular browser.

A Web site should not require a specific brand of browser. A site that is accessible to all browsers, but which looks best with a standards-compliant browser, is a different matter. In the past, there were "Best viewed with [name of a popular browser]" and "[name of a certain browser] Now" logos for sites. One individual did a campaign called "Best Viewed With Any Browser" to encourage browser-independent HTML pages. The campaign includes graphics for participating pages.

A Web site should not require a specific brand of browser. A site that is accessible to all browsers, but which looks best with a standards-compliant browser, is a different matter. In the past, there were "Best viewed with [name of a popular browser]" and "[name of a certain browser] Now" logos for sites. One individual did a campaign called "Best Viewed With Any Browser" to encourage browser-independent HTML pages. The campaign includes graphics for participating pages.

Advertisements sometimes compare commercial software packages based on the features in each package. Increasing the number of features can make the software look better in such a comparison. Software that is not commercial, i.e. FOSS, shareware, freeware, etc. rarely relies on published ads and has less incentive to include unneeded features.

One FAQ entry says that adding new HTML capabilities to Web browsers can be a problem if the capabilities are added in a rush or if they are not implemented properly. In addition, features such as ad-blocking (which help the user) are different from features such as tying a promoted service into a web browser from the same company.

The "Best viewed with..." on my site is viral marketing....most users don't even realize there is alternative...

Those users are the same ones who won't even notice the "best viewed with" tag. Besides, which is more important - that they all learn and love firefox or that they all learn and love the value of open standards?

Use this instead: anybrowser

Q: When will 1024x768 replace 800x600 for web design?

Helpful links:

• Viewable with Any Browser: Campaign
• The HTML Hell Page

For example,
JavaScript dropdown menus as the only way to navigate - yes, a common requirement. Any Browser compliance goes right out the window.

CSS2 and Mozilla (not I.E.) can do full roll-over menus without the help of scripting. But this does NOTHING on I.E. Similarly, microsoft.com has menus (in black, top right of screen) that do nothing unless I.E. is loading them).

If your boss/client wants menus like that, then there is no choice but to break the Any Browser campaign (which I believe in), and use JavaScript (or Server Side Includes) to create different pages for different browsers - again, breaking many browsers that spoof their headers, or otherwise lie (Opera, "MSIE Compatible").

1. Code to Any Browser.
2. Code to Internet Explorer.
3. Code to The Mozilla Engine.

4. Basically, the Any Browser campaign says to write everything to HTML 4.01 "Strict". Use CSS for all layout. Mozilla development fits this very nicely. Check out Eric Meyer's CSS/EDGE. Everything at CSS/Edge fits with the "AnyBrowser" way of doing things, but yet not everything at CSS/Edge will load with Internet Explorer.

   In my own less complex pages, I've found that I can make a page load /similarly/ in both, but I can't use HTML "Strict", unless Internet Explorer starts to choke (throwing everything to the left edge when I wanted it centered, etc.).

   So, as the above post mentioned, you end up writing to Internet Explorer, but you loose compatability with some "text readers for the blind", lynx, etc.

   Ah, but who cares if a blind person can read your web page. Well, maybe your web page isn't just a collection of photos, maybe you have something of interest. Then, you should care.

   Bottom line, the user will think that you're web page is broken if it doesn't load in I.E., and you loose readers this way. So, you end up with a web page that is a little more sparse, and less feature rich than you wanted.

The any browser page is best viewed with eyes closed. Who chose that color scheme?

"Best viewed with..." ads are evil, even if the browser you're supporting is great. People should be coding according to the standard because the web exists to present information, not tell you what you should be running. I prefer the any browser and W3 logos.

What you might want to do instead, is to have a 'tested with' list somewhere on your page, which lists the browsers you tested your page with. It shows that you take your work seriously, and mentions a lot of browsers people might want to try.

"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."

Most people haven't even figured out how to make a page look good in more than one browser.

See the Any Browser Campaign.

[And I don't mean 'detect what browser they're using, and serve them a page that's specially tailored to their browser', I mean making a single page that is written to the standards, and doesn't look like crap when some new unknown browser renders it]

We know JavaScript isn't good for 'Any Browser', as there are browsers that don't support it -- and it's even frowned upon by the WAI

So now there's a button campaign! Back in the day, we had Netscape Now!, then there was a MSIE Now!, and then there was a loooong silence. Way too long. Way way WAY too long.

Party like it's 1996!

In case you still have that personal homepage thing gathering dust in some corner of the web, or a blog that you think no one reads but several people actually do - DO the button thing! RELIVE the nostalgy! HEAR the whining from standards-brandishing people (who, gritting their teeth, will admit Firefox supports W3C standards well, unlike that other browser)!

I'll try that page as soon as the mozilla site isn't completely slashdotted. I had to make my own stupid "Mozilla Now" button several months ago, glad Mozilla folks have finally done them themselves =)

You're right, that valuable brand recognition is damaged by name changes.

But there were enough problems with the Firebird moniker to justify the name change. And, arguably, with bare single digit percentage market penetration, it's still early in the game; name changes aren't as such a big deal to the party faithful.

A really important step to promote the growth of firefox might be overlooked: their little button logos available for you to put on your web site.

As a responsible web site maintainer, these buttons can go alongside some previously collected good button merit badges such as

1. W3C complaince with standards HTML 4, CSS, XHTML 1, MathML, SVG, etc.
2. works best with any browser

But that was back when netscape really did crash all the time. Not always the fault of netscape, Windows 3.1 wasn't exactly stable, and netscape did use more than it could deliver.

Appearently I'm amoung the few who remember that netscape was themselves evil, and did evil things in their attempt to own the net. I joined the any browser campaign in reaction to netscape, back when microsoft didn't care about the internet.

My own site has a link at the bottom that says Best viewed in ANY browser. I'm not suggesting everyone does this, but surely it's better than perpetuating the problem?

I don't think that is right, what you really want to do is to join the Anybrowser campaign

(Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs!)

the link...

The users who use IE6 probably already use MSOffice. They are not who we are talking about. The point is to support everybody...

Start here.

Well, it's a decent starting point, as it has a lot of info, including links to browser compatability stuff.

This might be helpful...

http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/

Now, we add a whole new method of content rendering. We can't even impliment the main standards properly.

We can do so, a trained monkey could almost do so, it's quite easy to do... the problem is instead of trained monkeys we have so-called web designers that refuse to learn the basic facts about HTML. I don't know if you're one of them or not, but your post is a perfect example of the ignorant arrogance I'm talking about.

How do we plan to ensure that an audio interface can successfully read a website, as well?

By using HTML. Very simple. If your website is readable with lynx, it's readable for the blind. If it's not, you need to learn HTML and fix it.

Keep in mind that this is not what the web was originally designed to handle.

No, this is exactly what the web was originally designed to handle. Ever wonder why it's so difficult to control page layout exactly with HTML? It's because HTML is a content language, not a layout language. It was designed from the beginning to leave 'layout' decisions up to the browser, for precisely the reason that it was designed to be accessible via every disparate 'viewing' device imaginable, explicitely including teletypes and voice-readers!

Here go educate yourself.

Who on earth is running a browser earlier than 4.x?

Me. Lynx anyone? Not anyone around here who uses a shell is there? Also, old Macs - SE, SE30, etc - can dialup, and there are ethernet adapters for them. They make good, cheap, space-saving machines for simple access. Use Nifty Telnet for shell access, older versions of Fetch and Netscape 2.0.

But the important messge here is that:


The web is about content, not format.


Remember this. The whole point to html is that it's a *markup* language, not a *forced formatting* language. The browser takes the content and displays it in the manner of the user's choosing.
This seems to have been lost in the corporatization and control of the 'net.

Remember the good old days? When the web was about content and not about spam and marketing? That's where I live. I don't want to see blinking and flashing and animated ads and popups. If I can't see your content on lynx or with a 4.x or pre 4.x browser, you have lost my eyeballs and any potential to recieve my money. No popups on lynx.

The same goes for html formatted mail (there is a special place in hell reserved for people who send html formatted mail.) If I can't read it in pine, I don't even care what it says. Send me text if you want me to read it. (No web bugs and stuff that way too.)

In short, the goal is to get your content to other people, stop being such control freaks about how it is displayed. Write to the lowest common denominator, be creative with what is available there and you save much time, aggravation and money. -- And I'll be able to see your content.

NEVER FORGET --


The web is about content, not format.


Join the Any Browser Campaign and make your pages 'content enhanced'.