[Web4lib] Browsers to test

[Thomas Dowling]

On 5/29/2007 12:36 PM, Nancy E. Sosna Bohm wrote:

> In what versions of browsers should an academic website display with all of
> its design features intact? 
> For example, in NS4 a page might not be laid out as intended, though the
> elements are all present and functional.
> But should a page look identical in, say, Firefox 2.0 and Firefox 1.0.7 ?
> 


You've got to get beyond the idea that any page should look "identical"
for any two users, let alone any two browsers.

Coupla thoughts off the top of my head:

Validate your markup and CSS, and check for any unexpected hiccups in
current versions of IE, Firefox, and Safari.

Test with a screen reader, or in Lynx as a reasonable approximation.
(Or Opera with all images and styles turned off, or Firefox with the Web
Developer add-on set likewise, etc.).

Test with a tool like <http://colorfilter.wicklin.org/> or drop
screenshots into a photo editor and see what they look like in greyscale.

Drop a screenshot into a photo editor, blur the picture, and see if you
can still make sense of the page structure.  (That is, is top-level
navigation and main link structure comprehensible at a glance without
forcing the user to read?)

Test on a high-resolution screen with Firefox set to enforce a minimum
font size of, say, 12px.

Test with scripting turned off.

If your stylesheet is tricked out to optimize display of Verdana, test
on a machine that doesn't have Verdana.

Test in a 750-px wide window and a 1500-px wide window.  Test on a cell
phone or PDA.


-- 
Thomas Dowling
tdowling at ohiolink.edu