[thelist] Standards advice

[Kevin]

On Sat, Jan 04, 2003 at 03:47:49AM -0000, Daniel Fascia wrote:
> I have the task of redeveloping www.eusu.ed.ac.uk which
> as you can all see is a university site. That means it has to work
> on some nasty old browsers such as NS4 since for some reason
> 27% of people at ed.ac.uk still use it...

Have you gone into the college?
I'd best at every computer you sit down on Netscape is the default.
Slow computer departments in colleges are the bane of my existence.
(well, not really, but it is annoying)

> Should I go for this route for maximum compatibility or stick to XHTML?

Why not do both?
You can develop XHTML & CSS (for layout) websites that work on Netscape 4.
I'm working on one now.  Check out webstandards.org and some of glish.coms CSS
stuff.  It doens't all work in NS but you can easily pull off a ncie site with
it.

Alternatively, if you're choosing a particular design that you couldn't
'dual' implement then i'd go with just HTML4 & Use tables for basic layout and
CSS for most design.

Also since it's a university i'd try make it as accessible as possible too.
See my college's website (not in general a good example of a website but they
have a txt only site which parses the site [www.dcu.ie])

> just a little confused why some of the webs biggest corporations dont
> pay as much attention to standards as we all seem to

It's a lot of work.
Their sites are massive, and to switch over to validating it all would be
quite a bit of work is probably the main reason.

Good luck with whatever you decide,

- Kevin