Internet
Howard Russell

Hello Everybody,

This site (well, technically, only my portion of this site, not GeoCities as a whole) supports the Any Browser Campaign.

http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/

This site has been carefully constructed to appear much the same on any HTML 4.01 capable browser, have a functional appearance on handheld devices and text only browsers, and to print nicely. In an ideal world, every web designer would work to ensure this.

Browser recommendations:

• HTML 4.01, CSS compliant.
• 256 color or greater. (While almost all images on this site are high color, the pages themselves use the web-safe palette.)
• Javascript allowed. (For font and stylesheet changing.)

Test Browsers:

• Opera 9.00.8501
• Firefox 1.5.0.4
• Internet Explorer 6.0.2800.1106
• Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile 2003 SE
• Netscape 8.1

Additionally, tested for graceful degradation on:

• MSN TV Viewer 2.8
• NCSA Mosaic 3.0
• Text Only Browser Emulator (Opera)

This site was designed in and for Opera, though every effort was made to ensure cross-platform compatibility. I do not insist that you use Opera to view my site, but I do recommend it as an excellent browser.

If you have any problems viewing this site in any browser, please let me know and I will make every effort to fix it. This I beg, as I really want my site to be completely cross-platform compatable.

Mosaic really doesn’t like the programming trick I used to hide my email address from spam-bots—it shows mmmmmHoward Russell and says it’s an invalid address. The same trick, when not a mailto: hotlink, displays just fine:

howardrussell2000@yahoo.com

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GeoCities Whine

I had intended to make all of the pages on my site valid, but GeoCities won’t allow me to do so; the automated additions to pages sent out by their servers violate the W3C standards and force IE into quirks mode. So I have chosen to program these pages specifically for quirks mode, hence my use of HTML 4.01 Transitional, instead of Strict. For Opera and IE, that means pointless colored scrollbars. Why not? For FireFox and Netscape, I used some special Mozilla-only tricks for the Purple style. No FLASH! shudder

Once Valid HTML 4.01!

Once Valid HTML 4.01!

In their original uploaded forms, these pages were perfectly valid HTML 4.01 Transitional. However, since GeoCities invalidates my code with its additions, I cannot, in good conscience, claim these pages are valid. But in their original forms, they were.

Almost Valid CSS!

Almost Valid CSS!

About half of the cascading style sheets are valid. The core screen, print, and handheld style sheets are perfetly valid, but none of the nifty-colored, alternate style sheets are. Foreground and background colors were rarely both declared in the alternate style sheets, and several elements had foreground and background colors declared as the same value in order to hide them. Since they weren’t valid to begin with, I threw in a few Mozilla-only CSS elements for good measure. What the heck. So now the Mozilla only tricks and the colored scrollbars give me errors in my CSS. Ah, well. But it's nothing terminal. But remember, I did make the base style sheets valid.

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Cross-Platform Complaint
(Not a typo.)

On the first version of this site, I wanted to use cutesy little hearts as dividers. To avoid using a graphic, I tried using the HTML &heart; code. Unforunately, the browers were quite inconsistant in the display of that HTML code. Here’s clips from screen captures of what the hearts looked like in all three test browsers and what they look like in your browser for comparison.

 ♥   ♥   ♥ 
This Browser

The code is identical, the appearance is not. The worst part is the IE hearts looked best. In Opera 8, the hearts finally centered vertically like the IE6 ones. But after all that hassle, I had already given up on using the hearts! Then again, I did learn how to style horizontal rules. Silver linings and all that. Besides, I've since learned that the &heart; code isn't supported by older browsers anyway. But they all can deal with <hr>.

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IE6Win Bugs

In the course of testing this site, I found a few tiny bugs in Internet Explorer. I’ve now moved the bug report to it’s own test page.

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Final Thoughts

The Internet is for everyone, regardless of the browser or device they use. It’s up to us, the webmasters and webmistresses of the world, to take this into account and try to make our pages work with rather than against the user’s preferences. We can’t insist that anyone use a specific browser, or even a PC at all, just to read some fanfic.

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Grrr . . . Argh.