Category: Web Design

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OK, so you want a web anyone can use, whether they’ve picked Windows, Macintosh, Linux, or whatever came on their cell phone or PDA. What can you do? Here are some ideas:

Web Users

Try an alternative browser. Use it exclusively for several days. Get used to what it can do, and how it differs from Internet Explorer or the browser you’ve been using.

Better yet, try two. If you already use Firefox, try Opera. If you already use Opera, try Firefox or Chrome. You can always switch back if you like the other one better. The goal is to see what’s out there.

If you find a web browser you like, tell your friends and family. Get them to try it out, or give them a demo.

If you really like the browser, and would like to spread awareness, consider joining a promotional group like Firefox Affiliates or Choose Opera.

Bloggers and Content Providers

Write about your favorite web browser. Encourage your visitors to try it out. Post links or buttons pointing to the download site.

If you agree with the Alternative Browser Alliance‘s goals, feel free to link to us.

Web Developers

Base your design on web standards whenever possible. Take a look at sites like the CSS Zen Garden and A List Apart for ideas. The Mozilla Developer Center and Opera Developer Community are also good resources.

Validate your code. Learn which rules are safe to break. Where you have to use proprietary features, use graceful degradation so that other browsers at least get a usable experience. Some tools for validation include:

Try not to make assumptions based on browser detection, which is often wrong by the time the next version of a program rolls around. Where you have to check, detect capabilities, not browsers.

Start a collection of web browsers. When designing a site, check the layout with as many browsers as you can early in the process. Check critical parts of the site before you go live. Sites like Browsershots or BrowserStack can help you with browsers and platforms you don’t actually have.

Do your development on Chrome or Firefox. Both have extensive tools to help you test and debug your websites.

Conclusion

These are just suggestions. You can do as much or as little as you want, as much or as little as you can!

This article originally appeared on the Alternative Browser Alliance in 2005. This is the latest version before I retooled the site a decade later.

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The Web Standards Project has announced a joint task force with Microsoft to promote web standards in products like Visual Studio and ASP.NET.

I imagine this was probably a factor in the decision to divest themselves of Browse Happy last month. Certainly this project is more in line with their core mission—promoting the use of standards on the web—and fits right in with the Dreamweaver Task Force they ran with Macromedia back in 2001.

(via WaSP Buzz)

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On Sunday, a development version of Konqueror passed the Acid2 test. In the comments, someone posted a screenshot of iCab also passing the Acid2 test.

I did a double-take. iCab? Das Internet-Taxi für den Mac? The browser with the nice “Make iCab smile” campaign to encourage non-broken HTML on websites but CSS capabilities that have rivaled Netscape 4 as little better than a bad joke? That has been in perpetual beta for years with no sign of shipping a final release?

So I did the only thing I could do. I downloaded the new beta and tried it. Not only did it nearly pass Acid2 (there was a narrow white line across the middle of the face) but it actually handled all the layouts on my own site… something which it had always failed at spectacularly before.

The WaSP Buzz posted a congratulatory note to both this morning. Strangely, iCab is the first browser available to the general public that passes Acid2. The up-to-date Safari is still sitting inside Apple’s development labs, and while you can download the source for the updated Konqueror, you’ll have to wait for KDE 3.4.2—or possibly 3.5—to be able to use it yourself without running a bleeding-edge desktop. Update: Apple has just launched CVS access to WebCore, putting Safari in the same situation as Konqueror: you can download and compile the latest source code if you want, but if you just want to grab an installer, you’re gonna have to wait.

Follow-up in 2024: I’m surprised to discover that iCab still exists, and is still developed — though in 2020 the author rewrote it so it uses macOS’ built-in web renderer (like Safari) and not its own engine anymore.

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I’ll always remember a line from a play I was in during college. It was an original musical, and the composer couldn’t come up with a good line by the time he had to hand out the scripts, so he filled it in with “Come around and schmoo” just to keep the rhyme in place. Oddly, I can’t remember the line he finally replaced it with.

And of course, Firefox’s cookie preferences were labeled “Cookies are delicious delicacies” for so long during the beta period that by the time they wrote a real description for 1.0, someone wrote an extension to put it back in!

Well, sometimes dummy text makes it through “rehearsals,” so to speak. Jim Heid found live sites with various kinds of filler text. Not just the ubiquitous “Untitled document” (millions of pages), but samples of “lorem ipsum” filler and even ~250 hits for “this is placeholder text” (whoops, I’m gonna skew those results a bit.)

(via Scobleizer, who recommends using “xxxxx” exclusively for placeholders.)

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It’s always something. Apparently WordPress.org has been dabbling in black-hat SEO, hosting thousands of keyword-based articles on their high–page-ranked site and placing hidden links to them on their home page. Way to go, guys. This makes the paranoia over remote images almost look reasonable. What’s next, putting ads in the next default template?

The free/open source software world is based primarily on trust. Based on comments I’ve read over the last couple of days, WordPress has lost a lot of it. They’ve even been (mostly) dropped from Google. A sensible precaution while things are sorted out, but it unfortunately means the first top-level listing on a Google search for “wordpress” is wordpress.com, which looks like a cybersquatter. Not exactly an improvement.

In a support thread Matt answered last week, he referred to it as an “experiment.” He’s on vacation right now, but someone has taken it upon themselves to remove the bogus articles from the site.

My thoughts: Continue reading →

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Remember last year when I realized some net filter was looking at teentitans3.jpg, breaking the words in the wrong place, and concluding it must be adult content and therefore should be blocked? (It replaced the “offending” words with spaces, which get encoded as %20 in URLs.)

At the time I left it, since I figured anyone who installed a filter that brain-dead given the popularity of the Teen Titans cartoon deserved what they got. Well, the usability and “make the site work for the visitor” side of the debate finally won out (with a little help from “the people who use these filters aren’t the ones who install them”), and a few weeks ago I renamed the file to teen_titans_current.jpg.

Guess what? I’m now seeing hits for %20%20%20%20_%20%20%20ans_current.jpg.

Even when I give it word breaks, it can’t figure it out.

They’re lucky I called the file titans.html. Otherwise some people wouldn’t be able to see it at all.

Given this level of “quality,” can you blame librarians for opposing mandatory installation of filters on library computers?

Further reading: The Censorware Project, Peacefire, and Electronic Frontier Foundation.