Stylesheet Support for Browsers

Dear All

The W3C page http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/#browsers addresses browser
style capability generally while  http://www.webreview.com/guides/style/
has charts showing how far the main browser types implement CSS.
Especially useful is the 'Safe Chart' of features that ought to work on
most CSS-enabled browsers
http://www.webreview.com/guides/style/safegrid.html. Microsoft IE5 is
said to implement most if not all of CSS1 and much of CSS2 (reported at
the W3C European Leveraging meeting, Rutherford Appleton Lab, Oxford,
UK, 17th July, 1998). Has anyone had a chance to look at the IE5 betas
yet? 

Encouraged by our Disabilities Officer, I'm attempting to rewrite our
own heavily tables-oriented home page http://www.cc.ic.ac.uk with CSS
while also taking into account the WAI Accessibility Guidelines
(http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-WAI-PAGEAUTH-0414.html). Have been able to
emulate the page without a table, frame or 'filler GIF' in sight:
however the page design itself is not particularly sociable towards
users with low vision and design-wise is out-of-date anyway: the UK
Charity, the Royal National Institute for the Blind has produced some
helpful page-design guidelines on
http://www.rnib.org.uk/wedo/research/hints.htm.

The CSS rewrite of our page displays on MS-IE4 and Netscape 4. Browsers
such as Lynx and even an ancient alpha version of Mosaic (for Digital
Equipment Corp.'s Ultrix) also display the page meaningfully. However
ensuring it complies with the Accessibility Guidelines is a tougher
challenge. Whether we make the effort to meet that challenge depends on
how much we value our colleagues who may be differently abled to
ourselves. 

Cheers

Tom

Dr T Weil (Information Services Manager and College Webmaster)
Centre for Computing Services, Mechanical Engineering Building, 
Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine,
Exhibition Road, London SW7 2BX.
Tel: (0)171-594 6960; Fax: (0)171-594 6958; email t.weil@ic.ac.uk
URL: http://www.ic.ac.uk/~tw/
   

Received on Tuesday, 28 July 1998 05:09:59 UTC