AmosFiveSix.com

I just found these great indexes for the W3C HTML and CSS documentation. It uses a frameset with a list of all HTML elements or CSS properties in a frame on the left and the current W3C docs on the right. Very nice. I found them on Paul Parks’ website.

HTML Index: http://www.parkscomputing.com/html4/

CSS Index: http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/references/css2ref.html

Testing your site on multiple browsers if important if you want to look professional. I found this out the very first time I showed our new site design to our Executive Director. My computer has IE7 on it, and the site looks great with it. Unfortunately as I found out that afternoon, the Director had IE6 on her PC, and the site did NOT look good. If you want to project a professional image for your organization, you have to make sure you site looks good in all the browsers commonly used by your visitors. Check your site stats to find out what browsers your visitors are using.

First, check out my previous post on testing your website on a Macintosh.

TheSiteWizard.com has a good writeup on How to Check Your Website with Multiple Browsers on a Single Machine.

I great tool that I've found is IETester for Windows. It allows you to open side by side tabs for IE 5.5, IE 6.0, IE 7.0 and IE 8.0. I'm not sure how it does it, but it's IE 6.0 showed my website messed up just like my Director's IE 6.

Microsoft has Virtual PC images for Windows XP with IE6 and IE7 and IE8 beta.

Tredosoft has  the Multiple IE installer, which I have not tried.

The stats on our website for the first half of 2008 indicated that only 3% of our visitors used a Macintosh computer. That's a pretty small amount. It's tough to say iof we should worry about Mac users or not. (Our Managing Attorney over technology uses a Mac, so that's definitly one point for yes.) My major fear is someone in the news media who uses a Mac visits our site and sees it looks crummy on his computer, and then writes us off as unprofessional. So I think it is worth it to do at least some basic testing of our site on a Mac.

According to a Mac using friend of mine: "Safari and Firefox are the most popular browsers on the Mac. Camino was developed by the makers of Firefox but it is a ground-up mac application as opposed to Firefox which is adapted for the Mac."

Now, if you have a Mac, then you have no problem obviously. ;)

If you have a Windows machine, it may be a bit more of a problem.

You can now download Safari for Windows to get an idea of what your website would look like:

TheSiteWizard.com has a review of Apple's Safari for Windows from a Web Developer's Point of View.

Browsrcamp can give you a free screen capture of what your site looks like on a Mac with Safari (it doesn't say what version though). You can pay if you want more Mac browser options.

Another option appears to be an Abobe AIR application called Scout that uses the Safari layout engine. The technique is described here. The post is a little old and I haven't tried it myself.

Joelonsoftware.com has a good (but old) discussion on some options.

Of course the best option is to find someone with a Mac...

Based on our website stats from the first half of 2008, the following operating systems where our major visitors:

• Windows XP, used by 78.8% of visitors
• Windows Vista, used by 9.2% of visitors
• Macintosh OS X, used by 2.8% of visitors
• Linux operating systems were used by 1% of visitors

Some interesting operating systems:

• Windows CE had 210 hits
• Windows 2003, a server OS, 10776 hits. Could these be from our internal servers?
• Windows 3.x has six hits
• OS/2 had eight hits
• Sun Solaris has six hits
• BeOS has 1 hit

From these stats we can see that Windows is the main platform used by our visitors. I'm not surprised that Linux is so low, since it's not commonly used by the general population. I am a little surprised that Macs don't make more of an appearance, but perhaps that's because Macs are used by people who are a bit more affluent than our typical client? That’s pure speculation on my part of course.

Looking through our statistics for the first six months of 2008, the major browsers used to while visiting our site were:

• IE 6.0, used by 32.6% of visitors
• IE 7.0, used by 49.1% of visitors
• Firefox 2.0 and 3.0, used by 11% of visitors

Other browsers did not show up much:

• IE 5.5 and earlier was used by 0.5% of visitors
• Firefox 1.x was used by around 2% of visitors
• Netscape was used by 0.1% of visitors (including one visit from Netscape 0.6!?)
• Safari was used by 1.8% of visitors
• Mozilla was used by 1% of visitors
• Opera was used by less than 0.1% of visitors

Some interesting user agents that showed up now and then include: Galeon (GNOME web browser)

• Firebird (old Firefox)
• WebTV Browser (63 hits!)
• Konqueror
• Camino (a Mac OS X-native browser)
• Lynx
• MS Pocket IE
• Nokia PDA Browser
• BlackBerry
• WGet
• cURL
• Python and Java libraries

Some thoughts based on these stats:

• I'm surprised how quickly IE 7.0 has made it out there to almost 50% of our visitors.
• IE 6.0 is still around and we have account for that in our development.
• IE 5.5 is not around much any more, making it one less major browser to worry about.
• Opera is barely used by our visitors, something that does not surprise me in the end.
• Firefox is not used as much as I would have thought, but it's still our number 2 browser.
• Lots of unusual browsers access the site, but not very often.

From this it looks like we need to focus our design efforts on IE 6.0+ and Firefox 2.0+. If we can create an accessible site that looks good in both, we're probably covered for the other browsers.