[WEB4LIB] RE: Draft home page not usable on my IE 6

[Darryl Friesen]

> How many folks use online services for site testing?

I'm a big fan of both the Web Design Group (www.htmlhelp.com) and the W3C
(www.w3.org).  Both have online tools for validating HTML, CSS, links etc.,
many of which can be installed locally on your own servers.  In fact I've
just installed the W3C's link checker and the WDG's HTML validator on our
web server

>  NetMechanic
> has had an HTML verifier for years now.  Now they have a tool called
> BrowserPhoto that takes a snapshot of a page under each of 14 browser
> variants.  (Not yet IE6).   Anyone ever try it?
>
> http://netmechanic.com/browser-index.htm

Interesting idea.  Perhaps it's the bitter, apathetic, system administrator
side of me, but I don't care how my pages look for AOL or WebTV users. As
many people have pointed out, know your user base.  Mine/our Library's isn't
AOL or WebTV.

  <rant>I can't for the life of me figure out why people use AOL,
  WebTV etc. when very reasonably priced DSL exists in most markets,
  providing at _least_ 10 times the speed</rant>

I'm moderately interested in how it looks for Mac users, but not nearly
enough to pay the $15 NetMechanic wants (for each use!).  With the explosion
of open source and free software, it seems the world (and I think especially
the academic community with it's ever shrinking budget) has become quite
"frugal" (read "cheap").

I read a bit of the description for the NetMechanic thing, but as soon as I
saw they wanted money, I left.  I'll stick with trying to produce valid HTML
and CSS with the help of (free) tools from WDG and W3C, and not worry too
much about buggy and outdated browsers.

- Darryl

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  Darryl Friesen, B.Sc., Programmer/Analyst    Darryl.Friesen at usask.ca
  Education & Research Technology Services,     http://gollum.usask.ca/
  Department of Computing Services,
  University of Saskatchewan
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  "Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes"