[plug] OT: Sites bow to Microsoft's browser king

Michael Hunt michael.j.hunt at usa.net
Mon Jul 22 16:08:30 WST 2002


Leon Brooks [mailto:leon at brooks.fdns.net] wrote (somewhere near the bottom
of this message):

> On Mon, 22 Jul 2002 09:15, Andrew Furey wrote:
> > Taking a look at the HTML source, there's a couple of
> > things wrong with the image tag:
>
> > (a) duplicate "img" part
> > (b) backslash instead of forward slash
>
> > Fixing these two (especially the second) would fix it
> > I should think.
>
> On Mon, 22 Jul 2002 09:11, Colin Muller wrote:
> > For starters, change:
> > http://www.d9450.club.rotary.org.au/rotary/images%5Cwestaustralia.gif
> > (which might be this in the source HTML:
> > http://www.d9450.club.rotary.org.au/rotary/images\westaustralia.gif)
>
> > into:
> > http://www.d9450.club.rotary.org.au/rotary/images/westaustralia.gif
>
> Alex, I think you need to insist that Noel also use at least Mozilla for
> testing, and maybe throw copies of the pages at the W3C validator
> (http://validator.w3.org/) too.
>
> To have IE interpret straight across those errors is in one way
> impressive but
> in another very scary. For example, the canonical way of
> interpreting `\w' is
> as plain `w', so I think in principle any browser should read that URL as
> http://www.d9450.club.rotary.org.au/rotary/imageswestaustralia.gif but in
> practice I think they're just barfing on the backslash (ie
> refusing to try
> fetching it) because there are no matching errors in your
> webserver's logs.
>
> Cheers; Leon
>
>
> PS, the validator currently says that it can't correctly parse the page
> because there's no character set defined, and no DTD, then croaks
> completely
> because `It uses a public identifier that is not in my catalog.'
>
> Suprise, the image is broken on all of my browsers.

On another though slightly unrelated note is the need to take into account
people with disabilities when designing web sites. With the increasing use
of flash and heavily graphic based sites it is more and more difficult for
visually impaired people to use websites to access information. While there
have not been any recorded instances of cases where the government has asked
website creators to make there content more accessible it is within there
right and discrimination laws to do this.

I'm probably preaching to the converted but if you are negotiating for
professional services as far as website design is concerned then I believe
that you also need to be looking into this issue as well as cross browser
compatibility.

Michael Hunt



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