TheKeith said:
thanks everyone--that explains a lot. I'm wondering now whether I should
update all my pages to be standards compliant?
Why wouldn't you want to have your page comply with widely recognized
and established W3C web standards? Your pages would render more
consistently across web standards compliant browsers, web-aware
applications, web-aware devices, different media, etc.. The benefits of
authoring compliant webpages are both short term and long term ones and
they largely outnumbers the inconvenients and drawbacks.
With a valid document, you increase your target audience: you do not
diminish your target audience. With a valid document, you increase its
scope, its accessibility, interoperability: you have a better chance of
being rendered accordingly on all kinds of devices, platforms,
softwares, machines, in different contexts, etc.
In this case though, wont
people with older browsers be seeing my site incorrectly, since older
browsers do not support doctype switching?
Old browsers do not support doctype switching because they don't need to
since they only know of 1 rendering mode. Only browsers that offer 2
rendering modes will support doctype switching. But what is important to
know here is that a valid and validated HTML source code of a document
with a doctype declaration defining a DTD will work best in all
browsers, as best as such browser can render the document.
The number one problem on the web is not with validated documents but
rather with poorly coded pages (tag soup) to start with which are based on
- table designs, nested tables, (most of the time, they are
over-constrained too)
- deprecated elements: <font>, <center> are the most frequent ones
- inappropriate use of everywhere for padding, <img
src="spacer.gif"...>,
- document.write(), eval(), "javascript:" in href attributes,
setTimeout(),etc. used thoughtlessly,
- etc,etc.
making webpages which are a monstruous amount of complex code impossible
to update, impossible to understand. If you apply good and sane coding
practices when doing your pages, then your pages should never have
problems of accessibility to content and functionality with older
browser. I personally use different accessibility engines (WAVE 3,
HiSoftware Cynthia, colorblind viewer app., Lynx viewer, MSN-TV
viewer,etc..) to make sure my commercial pages will work in older browsers.
96% of all browsers in use out there have a good (didn't say excellent
nor perfect) support for HTML 4.01, CSS1 properties and DOM1 attributes
and methods. And the remaining 4% should be able to access your webpage
content without a problem if your page is well coded, that is coded in a
manner that it will degrade gracefully.
The very first steps in designing a page is to define, to create in this
order:
1-content, 2-structure, 3-HTML markup code, 4-style sheet/css, 5-script
functions, DHTML
so that if a particular browser (or web-aware application, device,
media, etc.) does not support a latter technology, then the page can and
will still be rendered on a former design level (references to such
unsupported technology are ignored).
DU
--
Javascript and Browser bugs:
http://www10.brinkster.com/doctorunclear/
- Resources, help and tips for Netscape 7.x users and Composer
- Interactive demos on Popup windows, music (audio/midi) in Netscape 7.x
http://www10.brinkster.com/doctorunclear/Netscape7/Netscape7Section.html