Browser support
Urban Guru's policy on browser support, accessibility, web standards and the law
One of our most frequently asked questions is "why does my site look funny on browser X?" This apparently simple question points to the most complex problem in web design.The fact is that there are hundreds of possible combinations of computer operating system and browser software. From the very first graphical browser, Mosaic on UNIX, to modern standards-compliant browsers such as Safari on Mac OS X, each combination of browser and operating system renders pages in sometimes radically different ways. Combine this with the different capabilities of people's hardware, from screen size to colour depth, and you can see that designing web sites presents a unique and complex set of problems.
The first thing to realise is that it is not possible for your website to look the same on every computer. This is the major difference between designing for print and designing for the web. Nevertheless, there are measures designers can take to maximise the compatibility of your website. These usually involve using the lowest common denominator in terms of website design - the techniques that designers used to make sites back in the nineties. Sites built this way should work reasonably well on the vast majority of browsers, and many agencies use these methods to build their sites.
Unfortunately with the advent of accessibility standards, this is no longer the right way to go about things. Web accessibility standards are designed to ensure that your site can be viewed by a wide range of people, including those with visual or physical impairments. It is now part of UK law that websites should be accessible to such users.
This presents designers with a problem, because the techniques that enable accessibility conflict with those that make complex sites look the same across the widest variety of browsers. For example many designers use invisible HTML tables to divide the screen up into separate areas. However, sections 3 and 5 of the web accessibility guidelines clearly state that you should not do this. Instead designers are supposed to use style sheets to control the layout and appearance of their websites, and use HTML only to mark up the structure of their content.
The move to separating the content of a website from its appearance is probably the largest paradigm shift of the last few years in web design. A number of web standards have been put in place which stipulate how this should work, and it makes creating and updating websites a lot easier. In addition, of course, it is necessary to follow these standards in order to comply with the laws on accessibility.
The problem is that not all browsers support these new standards, and the ones that do are not always compliant. For example, Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, the most popular browser in use by a long way, has until very recently had comparitively poor support for web standards.
This means designers have a stark choice. Either use older techniques to build sites that look the same across a wide variety of browsers and break the law on accessibility, or use new web standards and risk your site not looking good on older browsers.
Of course things aren't as black and white as this. It is possible to use web standards and make your site look good on the vast majority of modern browsers. Indeed using techniques that allow for graceful degradation, your site can still work on older browsers, although it certainly will certainly not look the same on these browsers. However this requires a certain amount of careful planning and testing, and hence a large amount of time. This of course means higher costs.
Urban Guru has a lot of experience in building accessible sites which comply with the law. As a result, our policy is always to build standards compliant websites. However in order to keep costs down, unless it is explicitly requested by our clients we will test our sites using only the following combinations. Other combinations are not supported, and so sites may not look the same on them. This is because they do not support the new standards.
Supported combinations:
Windows
Internet Explorer versions 5.01, 5.5 and 6.0
Mozilla version 1.0 and higher, including Firefox version 0.7 and higher.
Netscape version 6.0 and higher
Opera version 5.0 and higher
Apple Macintosh
Mozilla version 1.0 and higher
Safari version 1.0 and higher
Netscape version 6.0 and higher
Opera version 5.0 and higher
Linux / UNIX
Mozilla version 1.0 and higher
Netscape version 6.0 and higher
Opera version 5.0 and higher
Konqueror on KDE version 3.0 and higher
Unsupported browsers
Any browsers not listed above are unsupported. However the following browsers are the most common ones which are still in use and which we do not support:
Netscape version 4.x and earlier
Internet Explorer version 4.x and earlier
Internet Explorer 5.2 on Mac OS X which is broken
Internet Explorer 5.1 on Mac OS 9 which has several problems with CSS support.
Jez Humble
Director,
Urban Guru Ltd