From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Nov 20 2004 - 19:06:53 CST
From: "E. Keown" <k_isoetc@yahoo.com>
> Great idea! I code in the seldom-seen AHTML ('Archaic
> HTML'), as you all suspected.
>
> A friend tested a page I wrote last month and found it
> wouldn't work on any of his 5 browsers....oh well.
Well, Elaine, if you want maximum compatibility, you should better use XHTML
which adds more restrictions than it adds features. It's the old HTML which
causes most troubles across distinct browsers, due to its ambiguities, or
differences of implementations (frames, table formats with non-zero cell
spacing and cell padding, backgrounds, column widths in percentages
specified by HTML
width="x%"
attributes instead of by CSS
style="width: x%"
attributes or stylesheet rules...).
So:
(1) enforce the XML rules: close all tags (notably <p>...</p> or
<li>...</li> paragraphs, and <br /> or <img ... /> and <meta ... /> empty
elements), make them all properly nested.
(2) use only the standard subset of HTML elements and attributes. And make
sure you don't include HTML block elements within HTML inline elements (for
example <font> elements surrounding <p> paragraphs...)
(3) use simple CSS stylesheets, with only one rule per element or class. And
don't overuse some advanced CSS2 or CSS3 style features. Keep some tolerance
for table column widths (make sure that font sizes can be reduced or
increased for accessibility).
(4) test your pages in IE-6, FireFox-1.0 (excellent!), Netscape-4 (old...),
and on Mac Safari if you can: it should be enough to work well with most
other browsers (Netscape 6+ should behave mostly like IE-6 and FireFox on
Windows, as long as you don't need JavaScript).
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