Re: Consultation on Public Sector Web Sites

The date being 15 Sep 2008, Peter Naulls <peter@xxxxxxxxxx> decided to
write:

Richard Porter wrote:

... All I'm asking is that if you are providing a facility that you
can easily provide in a compatible manner, don't do it in a
complicated way that just causes problems for some users.

You're avoiding specifics.

Exactly!

What is "compatible" and how do you test it against many obscure
browsers which do not conform to standards (and which standards)?

The whole point, which you don't seem to be able to grasp, is that you
don't test on lots of obscure browsers. You design your site in a way
which is unlikely to cause any problems, and if you or your visitors
find any you fix them.

If I'm designing a web site I want it to be readable by 100% of my
potential audience, not 80% or 90% or even 98%.

Laudable, but you have to remember that the goal of your audience
is to view arbitrary websites 100%, on the platform they're using -
your site or otherwise.

This thread is about designing sites to work with browsers, not about
designing browsers to work with sites although that is just as
important. But browsers tend to have much better backwards
compatibility with sites than vice versa, mainly because web designers
tend to assume that you can just go off and download the latest
version of whatever browser they assume you're bound to be using.

Just because your site conforms to some as yet unnamed standards fails
to help them elsewhere on a site which conforms to a different set of
standards.

My sites do not conform to unnamed standards. Each page conforms to
the standard explicitly declared in the first line of the source and
which is shown by the W3C HTML/XHTML/CSS button(s) at the foot of the
page.

Your last sentence is ungrammatical. What is the subject of "fails"
and what does "them" refer to? What has this mythical other site got
to do with it?

--
Richard Porter
rich@ / www. richardporter.me.uk
"You can't have Windows without pains."
.

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