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Technical Info

Making a Web Site Browser Friendly

In order to have the broadest possible readership, many things were considered when designing this site. I established the following goals and technical criteria used to meet those goals. You might want to keep these in mind when designing your own site. Note that this site goes a bit overboard in its restrictions due to the nature of the business of the site. Many of the clients or prospective clients may not presently be using the state-of-the art computer systems and browsing software, and I do not want to alienate them.

The goals are

• Be informative
• Be easy to navigate
• Download quickly
• Render in a browser quickly
• Be readable in almost every browser (on any computer/device)
• Display well on any computer monitor (any resolution or color capability)
• Pages print out easily
• Be appealing
• Avoid things that commonly annoy people when web browsing

To accomplish these goals, the following criteria were used

• HTML elements
  • Adhere to W3C transitional HTML 4.0 but remain HTML 3.2 compatible whenever possible (all pages are W3C validated)
  • No frames (See Jakob Nielsen's frank article)
  • No Java/JavaScript or other browser language extensions required to access the site
  • No plug-in extension requirements for multimedia content
  • Always use end tags
  • Do not make links open new window without informing the user
  • No cookies
  • No automatic pop-up windows
  • Make web pages accessible to all people regardless of disability in the spirit of the Web Accessibility Initiative
  • No audio tracks that automatically play
• Graphic elements
  • Slim graphics for speedier downloading
  • No PNGs (Superior to GIFs, but not all browsers support these images)
  • No animated GIFs
  • Recycle graphics between pages to avoid frequent image downloading
  • Specify size of graphics in HTML to speed page rendering
  • Graphics contain alternate text (ALT tag) so the page is fully usable even when graphics are not loaded.
  • No background images unless absolutely necessary

To satisfy the above criteria, the HTML for the web pages was all hand coded, but to automate some of the production process, I used a combination of a text editor (usually emacs) and an HTML pre-processor (SHYPREC) I wrote in Perl.