Browser Friendly

These pages have been tested occasionaly using RedBaron 3.00SPE (Spyglass derived) under Linux, Arena beta-3 under Linux, Amaya 0.95b Beta under Linux, Lynx 2.5 under Linux, Netscapegoat Communicator 4.0 under Solaris, Netscapegoat Navigator Gold 3.01 under Linux, and Internet Exploder under Windoze. These pages are intentionally devoid of Frames, Java, Javascript, Active-X, unnecessary cookies, and other antisocial constructs. These pages do use tables, with consideration given to browsers which do not support tables. There are no animated GIFs to steal your CPU cycles, eat your network bandwidth, or mess up your status line.

Note that web pages which only work with a few browsers may be a violation of federal and state laws. If you sell to the federal government, you are required under the Technology Act P.L. 99-506 section 508 to make the documentation for your hardware, software, and other products accessable. If your institution receives federal funds, you are required by the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to make your documents accessable. If your documents cannot be rendered on a text based browser they certainly can't be accessable to the disabled. You must make your web pages accessable to people with vision and hearing disabilities.

Some links:

• HTML TIDY is a program which runs under Linux, Windoze, MacOS, and other operating systems and cleans up HTML code. Bad HTML is a major source of browser crashes and many other problems. HTML TIDY should also ease the transition to XML by making your HTML well formed.
• Bandwidth Conservation Society has some tips for reducing the bandwidth wasted by images.
• Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewerallows you to view a page with various features that may not be supported by some browsers disabled. It also has the option to break images with missing ALT, WIDTH, or HEIGHT tags. You should look at your page using at least two configurations: the default and the default with images disabled. The perl source is availible and can also be used to strip the crud out of your existing web pages.
• The Web Page Purifier is similar but allows you to see what a page looks like cleaned to HTML 2.0, HTML 2.0+Tables, HTML 3.2, or even webtv 1.1.
• The HTML to ICADD Transformation Service transforms a valid HTML Document into a SGML document type suitable for conversion to braille, speach, or other forms accessable to disabled users.
• Setext is a way of marking up plain ascii text in a way that does not impair readability without a browser as much as HTML but can be converted to HTML (or other formats) with hyperlinks, etc. Useful as an example of good typographical conventions for plain text files (and how to render boldface, italics, underlining, headings, subheadings, and hyperlinks). Good for email and usenet postings which may be processed into html form.