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We ought to be, and most of us think we are, making our websites accessible to all users regardless of their personal or equipment limitations. What does accessible actually mean? Some people think that it means "appears and behaves identically" in "all the browsers".
I employ a more practicable standard. I divide the characteristics of my sites into two classes:- standard and enhanced. Standard covers material or behaviour which is essential to the use of the site, enhanced refers to things which, whilst not essential, make for a better browsing experience.
What counts as standard will vary from site to site. In some cases, the background colour might be considered essential, in others the text is the only essential ingredient. Basically it's a judgment call on the part of the site designer.
Having produced and validated a site, I test it using a range of browsers. I categorise each of the browsers as below and fixup the code to comply with these definitions:-
| Browser | Deprecated | Current | Target | New |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Internet Explorer | 3, 4, 5 | 6 | 6 | |
| Netscape | 3, 4, 6 | 7 | Mozilla | |
| Opera | 4, 5, 5 | 7 | 7 | |
| Amaya | 4,5 | 6 | 7 | |
| Lynx | 2 | |||
| Mozilla | 1 |
| Deprecated | On its way out! I no longer test against these browsers These browsers may have presentational errors whilst showing standard content. Users of these browsers should seriously consider upgrading. |
| Current | These browsers are still in common use. All standard content should be presented flawlessly in these browsers. |
| Target | These browsers should handle both standard and enhanced content perfectly. |
| New | These are recently released browsers and will be moved ASAP to either current or target status. |
| 1991 | World Wide Web launched by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN | |||
| 1992 | First version of HTML | |||
| 1993 | NCSA Mosaic web browser launched. | |||
| 1994 | Netscape 1.0 | Active hosts * | ||
| 1995 | HTML 2.0 Forms, tables |
Netscape 2.0 JavaScript, Java, frames, plug-ins |
Internet Explorer 1.0 Internet Explorer 2.0 HTML tables |
18,957 |
| 1996 | HTML 3.2 Font tags CSS1 |
Netscape 3.0 Font tags |
Internet Explorer 3.0 frames, JavaScript, CSS, Java, plug-ins |
342,081 |
| 1997 | HTML 4.0 frames, script |
Netscape 4.0 CSS |
Internet Explorer 4.0 | 1,269,800 |
| 1998 | CSS2 XML 1.0 DOM 1 |
Netscape 4.5 | Internet Explorer 5.0 CSS2, XML, XSL, DOM1 |
2,807,588 |
| 1999 | XHTML 1.0 XSLT 1.0 |
Internet Explorer 5.5 DOM2 |
7,078,194 | |
| 2000 | DOM 2 | Netscape 6.0 CSS2, XML, DOM2 |
19,823,296 | |
| 2001 | XHTML 1.1 SVG 1.0 |
Netscape 6.1 Netscape 6.2 |
Internet Explorer 6.0 | 30,775,624 |
| 2002 | Netscape 7.0 Mozilla 1.2 | 35,114,328 | ||
*Source: Netcraft
Last updated ... 2003-02-22