Connection Speed
Clearly now divided into two bandwidth groups. The 56K modem dictates that a site's "low
bandwidth" option needs every trick in the book to speed things up. I count every byte of data.
For images, GIF and JPEG compression is used where each is appropriate. GIFs are reduced to the
minimum number of colours needed, and the best amount of compression is chosen individually for
each JPEG. Seperate CSS Style Sheets are used to reduce unnecessary HTML duplication, or the
variety of fonts and colours is limited. A broadband page is dealt with in a similar way
to allow as much bandwidth as possible for high resolution images or any streaming component
Browsers
Having achieved the top spot, the leading browser dictates to web
designers in much the same way as a chicken's back end dictates to an egg.
Comments, from other browser users
are particularly welcome. Such comments have left me no choice but to keep (currently) four browsers
installed, two versions of Netscape, plus Opera, and Internet Explorer which
I tend to keep at "current version -1" on my authoring machine.
Flash
The plugin itself will need upgrading each time Flash is released as a new version, therefore
the 90% browser support figure (often claimed) will not apply to the current version, but more
likely to support for a version released about a year ago. I choose to save a Flash file as
as "current version -1" wherever possible, and only as the most recent version as a last resort.
Accessability
Specific accessablity issues can be addressed by referring to the
Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) who
have created Bobby or the ATRC Web Accessability Checker, a page
accessability error detector. Bobby is designed to help web designers "...identify
and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities.", and
is free to use.
Take a look at one of your pages after Bobby has examined it, and then for a little
further light relief see what a Web TV browser makes of it,
after that there can only be one extreme left. What would a WML version of your pages look like
on a WAP Browser.
Back to chipwork.com.
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