strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive

Adventures with an unreliable narrator.

Oct 1 03: tinker, tailor

Spent a bit of today messing about with the site’s code, changing the navbar at left into a heavily-styled <ul> list. I suspect that for many of you—like, seven or eight out of the nine or ten—the changes will make no visible difference whatsoever. However, at last check there was at least one household still reading the site on a positively ancient browser which couldn’t handle CSS at all. (Yes, boys, I’m looking at you.) And this should make the navbar a little easier to read for folks like them. Plus it’s simply a better practice to follow, as Listamatic can explain more articulately than I.

That being said: let me again plead with everyone out there to use a good, up-to-date browser. The Mozilla project, for instance, has web-only and web-and-mail-and-everything browsers for all major platforms that work fabulously. Mac OS X users have Safari, which renders pages beautifully and is at the vanguards of standards compliance. I have been told that MSIE’s recent Windows builds are pretty good on CSS compliance, but I can’t say for sure whether that’s true or not.

And what exactly is standards compliance? Why is it important? Pull up a chair; I’ll try to keep this short. The page I see when I hit this blog using Safari should, in theory, look identical to what you see when you view it using Internet Explorer for Windows. Makes sense, right? Web standards are precise models for how markup codes like HTML, XHTML, CSS, and others should be implemented and displayed. The idea being that if all Internet-based technology follows the same gameplan, all end-users will have predictable, identical experiences when they encounter your content. These standards, as well as guidelines on everything from accessibility to privacy, are hammered out by a consortium of interested parties from all over the place known as the World Wide Web Consortium, or the W3C. Pretty much all new browsers are developed with the W3C’s standards guidelines somewhere in mind.

But despite the W3C’s best efforts, the variance in the ways that browsers will display the same page runs wide. Some of this is just because people use old browsers that aren’t up to speed with the current set of rules; some of it is because people use buggy software. Which means that I, as a web designer, can either (a) accept that the alignment of my subheads gets messed up on many machines (to say nothing of the graphic effect on the navigation bar); or (b) try to write code that branches off in a zillion directions, trying to compensate for the idiosyncratic behavior of every version of every browser I can think of, no matter how out-of-date, all at once, in order for my design to be rendered with as little variance as possible for the widest possible audience. Neither of these answers is all that satisfying, or much fun. (Note to self: tightening my DOCTYPE declarations would be a good idea, though.)

Strike a blow for consistent web representation! Get the latest version of your favorite standards-compliant browser today. Do it for me. Because frankly I think my design looks kind of cool when you can see it properly.

Commentary

OK. What? Sadly, I am using the the most recent version of Internet Explorer - and I still see the black boxes on the Nav bar. Sigh.

posted by Sari, Oct 1 03 1:33 PM

The links on the nav bar should look like they’re written on floating panes of frosted glass—you should see the faux-bubble-chamber-image behind them, kind of fuzzily. It’s a cool little trick. Next time you kimono my house I’ll show you.

posted by Andrew, Oct 19 03 11:44 PM

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