Re: centring tables

by "Kehvan M. Zydhek" <kehvan(at)zydhek.net>

 Date:  Sat, 9 Dec 2000 17:26:33 -0800
 To:  "Nick Doylend" <ndoylend(at)hashishin.net>,
<hwg-style(at)hwg.org>
 References:  daydreamer
  todo: View Thread, Original
Nick,

It's been said before on one of these lists, and I guess it needs to be said
again:

The HTML Validator is a GUIDE; you can't expect 100% perfect validated code
and expect your pages to work on ALL browsers and platforms. Some browsers
(Netscape 4.x especially) are so beyond hope that you HAVE to invalidate
your code just to get it to work (of course, that all depends on the
complexity of the page, too).

You comment, however, is the reason I'm writing:

>>> Definitely but what if one or two of my audience are using obscure
browsers or platforms?  I can't test on every configuration but at least
with valid code they have half a chance of being able to make sense of my
content. <<<

The latest estimates I've heard is that there are well over 1000 different
browsers and variants out there. No, you can't test for all of them. But you
can test for the big ones, knowing that the small ones will either be close,
or will have such an extremely small group of regular users that's it's
almost not worth fixing for them.

If your page works in MSIE 5.x and up, it'll work (perhaps with some minor
tweaking here and there) in AOL 5, AOL 6, Netscape 6 (and any others that
use the Gecko engine), and Opera 5. If your page works in MSIE 4.x and up,
you may have to do a little more tweaking to it, but it should work in all
the previous browsers as well as Opera 4, perhaps even Opera 3. WebTV can
sometimes be included in this. And to some extent, Netscape 3 and 4 as well.
But remember that the more complex the page, the more it strays from flat
HTML to DHTML, the less likely it'll work properly in the older browsers.

Before, I mentioned that there might be a few people using an obscure
browser. Aside from WebTV where they don't have the choice, you can pretty
much be guaranteed that SOMEWHERE on their computer, whether it's a Windows
or Mac machine, that there's a copy of MSIE or Netscape. They might not be
up-to-date, but they're likely to be there. From what I hear from users of
Linux, MSIE won't work there, but Netscape does, so even on Linux, you're
likely to get a large percentage of users that use one of the big browsers,
even if they prefer Lynx (which, unless it's changed, is text-only).

So my advice is this: Build for the MSIE 5.x/Netscape 6/Opera 5 trio. Once
you have your pages working the way you want in this collection, make an
alternate set of pages for Netscape 4.x. Or don't. The level of detail and
complexity is up to you. But aside from the absolute most basic webpage, you
cannot possibly build for ALL the browsers out there without first going
insane and building multiple different branches of the same site to handle
specific quirks of each browser, and then going insane again trying to keep
it all updated.

Good luck,
Kehvan M. Zydhek

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