What’s with this site?
If you find this site looks strange, it may be because your browser is from the dinosaur age, and it is attempting to pilot a flying saucer. This site uses only 100% organic web-grown standards such as XHTML and CSS. These standards make it easier for web pages to be designed so that they display correctly in as many browsers as possible.
Web standards have come a long way since Mosaic appeared in 1995, but pages have been designed almost from the start to display in specific browsers, leading to pages containing the warning “best viewed with Browser X” because they use tags that only one browser understands. Along with this, the mentality of the printed page brings its limitations online—it must look the same everywhere it is viewed—leading to pages filled with hacks to get around issues caused by bugs in each of the major vendor’s products, and leaving the other browsers out in the cold.
Do you really have so much time that you can waste it picking apart the difference between individual browsers, and hacking your web pages each time a new browser is released? I don’t. I am making a choice to give up chasing browser bugs, and just enjoy the web for its compatibility and ease-of-use. The irony here, is that by making this choice, I am limiting the choice of some readers simply because the web has a history of poorly designed browsers.
What this means in practice is that any browser written to the published standards will display this site perfectly. Not so for those browsers that ignore the standards.
Additionally, if your browser is Netscape 2 (ask your grandfather), it would still be able to access the content. The only caveat is it cannot interpret the page’s modern styles, and as a result, it looks pretty plain. Better that than a message to say that you can't use the site at all because your browser hasn't been catered for, eh?
This is a simple way to separate content from design, and is the way good web pages should be put together. It means that the content continues to be accessible regardless of the design of the page.
I’m happy, because this site takes less time to maintain, looks great for most people and is accessible to a wide range of software.
Modified: Friday, 1 January 2010