Screen Size and Web Browsing

The purpose of this experiment is to determine the effect of screen size on the speed of navigating common web pages. We performed the experiment on 12 students and concluded that the larger the screen size, the faster a typical web page is browsed.

DiPierro, Chris, George N. SHORE (1997). Design>Web Design>Usability>Web Browsers

Software Features and Changes Needed for Better Viewing

With Netscape, when you first load this page, none of the following links are marked as 'already seen'. IE is very bad on this point: when you load this page, all the links below (internal page A NAME links) are marked as 'already seen'. That is, Netscape tracks internal page jumps; IE doesn't recognize them; in its history tracking, it lumps together all the links for a page as being identical with the overall page as a destination. This is a great example of a basic feature that is very much needed.

Hoffman, Michael. Hypertext Navigation. Design>Web Design>User Interface>Web Browsers

They Shoot Browsers, Don't They?

Standards-aware developers, by their very nature, will object to adding a line of unnecessary markup to their documents just to get one single browser to behave as it should by default.

Keith, Jeremy. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Web Browsers

To Hell With Bad Browsers

Why does ALA look like @#$ in your 4.0 browser? Read this now.

Zeldman, Jeffrey. List Apart, A (2001). Design>Web Design>CSS>Web Browsers

Toward a More Standards-Compliant Internet Explorer

Reveals a major flaw in Internet Explorer when dealing with floats. If you are serious about moving from a table layout to a CSS layout, you must read this article first.

Gallant, John P. Digital Web Magazine (2003). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Web Browsers

TV Meets the Web

Maybe Web-access through television sets doesn't need to be as usable as a normal computer if it can provide other benefits.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1996). Design>Web Design>Usability>Web Browsers

Version Targeting: Threat or Menace?

Real DOM support is a game changer. Enabled by default, it would bring many sites to their knees. That would break the web, and not in quotes. Providing IE8's greater compliance on an opt-in basis is the only way to get everyone over the scripting hump.

Zeldman, Jeffrey. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Web Browsers

Web Accessibility Toolbar  

The accessibility toolbar is to aid the manual process in validating web sites. Developed by AIS and provided in Europe and the UK by Southbourne Internet Ltd.

Southbourne Internet Ltd. (2004). Design>Accessibility>Software>Web Browsers

WebTV Usability Review

WebTV achieves a very high level of usability given its design constraints. Unfortunately, the constraints are so severe that even this great design ultimately fails to provide an optimal Web user experience. WebTV's usability engineers have done a good job at making it very easy to install and as easy as possible to use, and WebTV's imaging engineers have done an incredible job at high-quality character rendering in an NTSC video signal. In fact, the screenshots in this column do not look as good as WebTV does when displayed on a good television set: you have to see it to believe that it's possible to achieve WebTV's level of text readability on a television screen.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1996). Design>Web Design>Usability>Web Browsers

Why Don't You Code for Netscape?

Long considered the Holy Grail of web design, 'backward compatibility' has its place; but at this point in web development history, shouldn’t we be more concerned about forward compatibility? ALA makes the case for authoring to web standards instead of browser quirks.

Zeldman, Jeffrey. List Apart, A (2001). Design>Web Design>Standards>Web Browsers

Why Gecko Matters: What Netscape’s Upcoming Browser Will Mean to the Web

Netscape is about to unleash its new browser, built around the Gecko rendering engine. Theoretically the first completely standards-compliant web browser, Gecko enters a world where most people use IE5 (which is not completely standards-compliant). Is Netscape’s effort too little, too late? Or is it the beginning of a new and better way to create websites? Zeldman articulates The Web Standards Project's position and explains what Netscape’s browser will mean to the web.

Zeldman, Jeffrey. List Apart, A (2000). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Web Browsers

XML and Browsers

Now you should know what XML is for and how to write a basic XML document. In this part I will show you how to create a full XML document and load it in a browser, as well and the different ways it can be displayed.

Gowans, David. Free Webmaster Help (2001). Design>Web Design>XML>Web Browsers

XML Data Binding

XML became an integral part of Microsoft's strategy around the time of Internet Explorer 4. IE4 was an XML-aware browser. As well as displaying HTML documents, it could also display XML documents through an inbuilt XML parser. Another part of IE4 was something known as the XML DSO (Data Source Object). The XML DSO allows you to manipulate primitive XML 'data islands' by binding (or attaching) the XML data to HTML presentation elements. The XML elements within Internet Explorer continue to be improved and added to with every new IE release.

Self, Tony. HyperWrite (2006). Articles>Information Design>XML>Web Browsers

The Google Chrome Comic: Why it Didn't Work

I'm amazed with the Google project, because the lack of narrative seems like a basic omission from such a high profile project.

Porter, Alan J. Content Pool, The (2008). Articles>TC>Technical Illustration>Web Browsers

Web Browsing through Adaptive Technology: A Consumer Information Resource

The Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC), University of Toronto coordinated efforts with the Diversity Management Directorate (DMD), Public Services Commission of Canada to systematically evaluate how commercial World Wide Web (WWW) browsers functioned with various types of adaptive technology under different operating systems. The types of adaptive technology examined include screen magnifiers, scanning / switch access systems, alternative keyboards, screen readers, Morse code input devices and voice recognition systems.

Nguyen, Kevin K. and Linda S. Petty. University of Toronto (2007). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Web Browsers

Bug Fix: IE Double Margin Float Bug

The double-margin float bug -- an Internet Explorer-exclusive bug wherein an element that is floated – and given a margin in the same direction as the float – ends up with twice the specified margin size -- has been a source of irritation for CSS-loving web designers for years. While an easy (if mysterious) fix has been known for quite some time now, it occurs to me that perhaps not everyone knows about it. So I thought it couldn’t hurt to toss another explanation out there.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>CSS>Web Browsers

Internet Explorer and the CSS Box Model

One of the differences between Internet Explorer and standards compliant Web browsers that cause a lot of trouble for CSS beginners is the CSS box model. Since the box model is what browsers use to calculate an element’s total width and height, it is quite understandable that different browsers producing different results can be both confusing and frustrating.

Johansson, Roger. 456 Berea Street (2006). Articles>Web Design>CSS>Web Browsers

The W3C Process May Be Slow, But Browser Vendors are Slower

Don’t blame the W3C for being slow when the real problem is browser vendors not implementing existing specifications fully and properly.

Johansson, Roger. 456 Berea Street (2007). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Web Browsers

IE Version Targeting: A Neutral Perspective

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz going around about Internet Explorer 8 and plans to include in it a feature called "version targeting." You can scour the net for blog posts and articles about version targeting, but you'll get a lot of debate and several different views on this topic, and it's difficult to pinpoint just the facts. What is version targeting? Version targeting is a way to tell Internet Explorer how it should render a page.

Rodriguez, David. Web Page Design for Designers (2008). Design>Web Design>Standards>Web Browsers

Internet Explorer Bug Fix: Disappearing Positioned Anchors

Internet Explorer does not respect the height and width properties of block-level, absolutely positioned anchor tags if they contain no content (or if that content has been moved or removed). So what’s the workaround? Well, there are several.

Glazebrook, Rob L. CSSnewbie (2008). Articles>Web Design>CSS>Web Browsers

New Accessibility Features in Internet Explorer 8

Hi, my name is JP Gonzalez-Castellan and I’m the Accessibility Program Manager for IE8. The IE team has been working towards making IE8 the most accessible browser possible, and we wanted to detail some of the work we’ve done toward this end. In this post I will provide you with some background on Accessibility, I’ll cover new UI features (Caret Browsing, Find on Page, Adaptive Zoom, High DPI, etc) and also platform features (support for ARIA, support for IAccessibleEx, and support for additional WinEvents) that improve the Accessibility of the browser.

Gonzalez-Castellan, J.P. Microsoft (2008). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Web Browsers

Current Browsers and the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

Any effort on the part of web authors to add accessibility features is rendered useless if browsers and assistive technologies don’t take advantage of them. User agent developers need to ensure that their products support these features and, most crucially, make them available to users in an accessible and obvious manner. What follows is a quick run-down of most of UAAG’s guidelines and checkpoints, annotated with comments, suggestions, personal gripes about current levels of implementation, and wishlists for future browser versions.

Lauke, Patrick H. Web Standards Project (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Web Browsers

When Good Browsers Go Bad -- And They All Do

Jeffrey Zeldman must have thought he'd never live to see the day. Ten years after he co-founded the Web Standards Project, all of the major browser vendors have shown renewed commitment to supporting World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards in the last few years -- and they're following through. Those who lived through the browser wars of the '90s might think that hell has frozen over, were it not for one, small problem: Users still experience plenty of problems on the Web.

Mitchell, Robert L. Computerworld (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Web Browsers

WebAIM: Using NVDA to Evaluate Web Accessibility

This article is designed to help users who are new to NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) - external link learn the basic controls for testing web content, and to serve as a reference for the occasional NVDA user. NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) is a free and open source screen reader for the Microsoft Windows operating system. It supports over 20 languages and can run on any computer entirely from a USB drive with no installation.

WebAIM (2009). Articles>Software>Accessibility>Web Browsers

Browser Compatibility Table

A list of various CSS rules and their compatibility with common browsers and operating systems. With a quick glance, the designer or developer can note which CSS properties should be used or avoided. The table also offers an interactive feature that highlights the row your cursor is on. This makes pinpointing the compatibility of a specific CSS property much easier.

Centricle (2008). Reference>Web Design>CSS>Web Browsers