Re: Browser and Technology Support [Was: Re: [w3c-wai-gl] <none>]

> >Which is an example of some poor scripting techniques (Browser
detection
> >being the most obvious, have you looked what happens in Opera or
Konquerer
> >for example?)
>
> Is that why it's Freeware?

Probably not, there's been a large problem with the advocation of Browser
detection by the vendors own examples and many books, this is
increasingly being shown to be a very poor technique (the lack of
backwards compatibility with NN6 to NN6.1 in the DOM, and the fact IE5.5
and Mozilla have a near identical subset is showing it slowly.)
Education of the documentors of the browsers and book authors is
important, both are fortunately happening and I try my hardest.   This
has meant though that authors have fallen into these bad techniques
simply because they were so universally advocated.

>What can I do to make it usable?

Oh, it's usable, it just will do nothing in certain browsers where it
could do everything, as you say you're using it for a controlled audience
so it's probably not relevant, it could suddenly go wrong when you
upgrade to IE7 or something.

> Can I do it without stylesheets.

Little reason to, and it would be a lot more complicated than the above
changes (a basefont I suppose, but do we really want to advocate too much
HTML 3.2??)

> Terri will be using her work laptop to
> take to the home if weather doesn't let her take Mom to her home. What
> software would Terri need to use stylesheet with IE?

IE has supported stylesheets since IE3 in some manner with more than
enough font support to do whatever you want.  a user stylesheet added via
Tools-Internet Options - User Style Sheet, pointing at a plain text file
which says nothing but

body { font-size:2em; }

would make her general browsing behaviour greatly improved, and would
work with the page, this is really an instance where educating the user
to use their accessibility aids is better than trying to modify just the
page in question (teach a woman to fish and all that.)
(if you're using IE5.5 then
body { zoom:2 }
might be better as that would also enlarge images on the page so are more
readable.)

Jim.

Received on Thursday, 27 September 2001 04:47:39 UTC