This week we discussed web standards. Looked into the particular standards that UWE have in place. We considered:
- Policies
- Mangement
- Accessability
- Disablility
- Compliance
- Development
- Process
- Web Standards
- Budgetary Constraints
- Legal Framework
- Technical Constraints
- Skills and Training
- ethical vs legal (dicrimination through technology)
We also had a look at a site our tutor is building: http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/xmlwiki/ER/index.xq?tag=ER
It is a website with data modelling worksheets you can work through in an interactive tutorial like manner. Your entries are compared to a possible set of entries to determine if they are correct or not along with some other interesting features.
I wass assigned the job of looking at possible browser compatability and screen resolution issues.
I found a very cool site: http://www.browsershots.org. You can enter a URL here and it will show how the web page will display in different browsers across all platforms. An image of each display is uploaded and you can view them online or download them in a zip file. This site is open source so it is free to use. It allows you to choose the brosers you want to see the display in and platform with optional extras such as:
- Screen size (640 to 1680 px wide)
- Color depth (8bits per px to 32 bits)
- Javascript (enabled/disabled/version)
- Java (enabled/disabled/version)
- Flash (enabled/disabled/version)
Here are some of the results:
firefox-31-windows-xp
opera-963-windows-xp
seamonkey-20-windows-xp
Due to the fact the site has had little styling applied at this stage the variations between browsers and screen resolutions are very minimal if not non existant. Once style in form such as divs with set widths (percentages or pixels) is added then more consideration on cross browser compatability will be needed. As for now the site is sound in this departement. However when adding style I would stick with a width of 960px for the complete screen as this is the most commonly used and will display well on all screen resolutions above it.
