Browser Upgrades
Hey. You’ve most likely been ushered to this page because your Internet browser does not properly support these things we in the business call “web standards”. These standards have been created by the » World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the people behind the web, so that we’d no longer have pages that only people with certain browsers could access. If all webmasters code using these accepted standards, then all sites will work the same in whichever browser you choose; which, after all, was the original goal of the web.
What did I do wrong?
Nothing really. This site was created using two of the W3C’s standard technologies: HTML 4.01 and Cascading Stylesheets (CSS). Your browser does not support these standards correctly and so, to spare you from seeing the attempt your browser would have made at displaying the full design, I have hidden much of the presentational aspects of the site from you. You can continue to read the site in it’s stripped-back form, or you can see about improving your experience.
Users with standards-supporting browsers get the full version of the site, and never have to see this page. Once you start putting your site together you may be making a page like this of your own. More and more websites are now moving to standards-compliant designs, so you’re going to be coming up against a few more of these lovely warning messages unless you take action.
Where to from here?
So what can you, the reader who sees less than the optimum enactment of a page, do about this situation? You can consider downloading and installing any of the following browsers, all of which do a good job. You will probably find the most recent version of your current browser among this crop — the newer browsers, as a rule, have better standards support. With these you will see this site and others the way you should. All of the following browsers are available free.
Firefox
The open-source Firefox browser is the creation of the group behind the powerful Gecko rendering engine which powers many other browsers. It supports all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff like HTML, CSS, PNG and the DOM. Don’t worry about the acronyms — they simply amount to great stuff. Firefox flies the flag as the most compliant of the current browsers and is available for every computer platform under the sun. Improved versions are available nightly. My favourite browser.
» getfirefox.com
Safari
Safari is Apple’s own browser for Mac OS X, and comes installed on all new Macs, as well as now being available for Windows. It has a terrific rendering engine, and has the best JavaScript performance of any browser.
» www.apple.com/safari
Chrome
In 2008 Google hired a bunch of ex-Firefox developers and other clever people to create their own browser. Chrome, like Safari, is based on the WebKit rendering engine, which means it’s super-fast, and executes JavaScript extremely quickly, which is particularly useful on JavaScript-heavy sites like Google’s own Gmail.
» www.google.com/chrome
Opera
Opera Software have long been promoting standards-compliance in browsers and offer good support for most standards. It’s fast at displaying pages and is a small download. It is available free, and supports Windows, Linux, and Mac OS; with support for further platforms in the works.
» www.opera.com
Internet Explorer
IE for Windows has decent support for many important standards, including the vital HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 and CSS-1, as well as good JavaScript support. It delivers a generally good all-round experience.
» www.microsoft.com/windows/ie
If you’re interested in making your own websites, have a look around HTML Source!
