Text Only Web Pages
Topic: Web Design
Found another useful web service today which allows authors to see what their pages look like (sort of) when viewed with a Lynx text-mode browser on this
Lynx Viewer. They recommend that you should download a copy of Lynx itself and run it locally but this is the next best thing.
Accessible Web Pages
Topic: Web Design
I found another very useful website,
Usablenet.com, last Saturday. Their 'LIFT Online' trial will provide you with a free 5-page sample report on your website which stays on their server for five days. These reports evaluate your pages for accessibility and usability and provide loads of links to all the W3C guidelines. I have been busy making notes on all the comments. However, so many possible problems were thrown up (all my images and links, for instance) that I feel like the old woman who lived in a shoe! I still have not caught up with all the results from CSE HTML Validator. I had to really rush through the last few page checks before it disabled itself!
A Very Useful Web Authoring Tool
Topic: Web Design
I am currently checking my pages with the trial version of a program called
CSE HTML Validator Pro 6. You can use it for 30 days or 100 validations, whichever comes first, after which it deactivates itself and you have to purchase the full version or delete the program. It is absolutely brilliant at spotting all sorts of coding and spelling errors and gives advice and tips on just about everything. It has also pointed me in the direction of
Dan's Web Tips, another excellent website to add to my favourites. At present, I am halfway through the trial period, so I am being kept rather busy! I must admit that I was actually using the Validator last December but didn't have time to finish the trial period because of Christmas. I did delete it (and some clever coding somewhere prevents you reinstalling the trial version!) but then my computer crash last April wiped out any remaining traces on the hard disk, so I was able to install it again as I still had the csesetup.exe! Very naughty! I have got a magazine cd somewhere with a free early version of the program - will have to install that later or perhaps buy the full program.
Old Browsers (and I don't mean me!)
Topic: Web Design
Came across a website called
AnyBrowser.com on which you can view a page as it appears on various old browsers. Ugh! Virtually all of my pages were a real mess! Very old browsers don't read style sheets at all and it appears that Netscape 4 can't read internal style sheets on a page. So, I am now linking my pages to the main style sheet plus another one specific to that page. (Will have to tidy that up when I have time.) Also, my table backgrounds don't show up. That means that a dark page background makes the text completely unreadable. How many people still have old browsers?
