Here’s an opinion: The Web is about being accessible to all – it is not, nor should it be, the domain of any one operating system, organisation or web browser. There are a good set of international standards which determine how information is delivered to and presented by browsers. Most – no, make that, “nearly all” – browsers are compliant with those standards, within a few degrees of buggishness and interpretation. So making a site work with these is a matter of tweaking by degree, not kind. There is of course one notable exception, and that (again, “of course”) is Microsoft: it’s browsers display a level of both disregard for standards and are of such a bug-ridden nature that making a site work consistently requires delving into an underworld of hacks, tweaks and rewrites that are sufficient to cause apoplexy or death-by-boredom in any thinking organism.
In order to tread the fine line of compromise between high-handed disregard for poor design and monopolistic practice and preventing the many users of such products from actually accessing these sites, I’ve gone for the “greatest good of the greatest number” and made everything work fine with most open source browsers and the latest version of Internet Explorer, on Windows and Mac. Those that don’t work properly at the moment are Opera and Omniweb. This will be attended to just as soon as possible.
Please do consider this, by preference, an ABM site: Anything But Microsoft. If they ever learn and decide to create standards-compliant browsers, then that’s just find and dandy. In the meantime, I look forward to the day when the world’s web designers bring a class action against Microsoft, to claim for the time, lives and money lost in trying to make their bloody browsers work. Me, I’m off to ride my motorcycle.
This site has been developed using CSS and XHTML and most of the code will happily validate against these standards, exceptions being CSS hacks to work around MIE bugs/features and some of Movable Type’s own code. Tsk.
Recommended Browsers:
I’ve tested the site with the following combinations – if you’re using another and having problems, please contact me or comment on this entry.
- Mac OS X 10.3.x: Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, Camino, Netscape;
- Mac OS 9.2.2: Mozilla, Netscape;
- Windows XP (SP1 & SP2): Firefox, Mozilla 1.7, Netscape 7.1;
- PalmOS 5 (mobile site): WebPro; AvantGo.
“You will, but not yet” Browsers:
“You could but why would you want to?” Browsers:
- Anything by Microsoft – all platforms.
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