Group items tagged

Honing in on browser incompatibility issues in Web development, Adobe Systems on Thursday is announcing CSS Advisor, a Web site that documents these problems and offers solutions.

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the W3C, has said it best: “Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.”

Methodologies including layered development via progressive enhancement, Unobtrusive Javascript, and Hijax ensure that higher layers don’t disrupt lower layers. However, representative testing of the core experience is critical. If you choose to adopt a Graded Browser support regime for your own web applications, be sure your site’s core content and functionality is accessible without images, CSS, and JS. Ensure that the keyboard is adequate for task completion and that when your site is accessed by a C-grade browser all advanced functionality prompts are hidden.