Standards and Browser Support

With the move to the new somascape.org domain in December 2005, it was decided to give this site a makeover, and to begin the transition to a CSS based implementation.

That initial stage primarily entailed the removal of all the <font> tags from the HTML code. Although all the HTML was valid 4.01 Transitional, the CSS was in need of further work – it was functional, though it wasn't as semantic as it should have been ... and it didn't validate. :o( Additionally, tables were still being used for layout purposes.

June 2007 saw a more complete CSS implementation, where CSS positioning is now used in preference to tables, which are now used only for tabulated content. The CSS is more semantic, the markup is now XHTML 1.0, and there is now less use of images for layout adornment.

The site has been tested using Firefox and Safari on a Mac (where in each case it renders as intended), along with NetSurf on a RiscPC-SA which gets it right mostly (CSS rollovers don't appear to work, and positioning is a bit off here and there - minor issues).

Given that a large part of this site is RISC OS specific, I have also checked it using Fresco on a RiscPC, to establish how it renders in a non-CSS browser – despite it looking a little plain, it is still fully accessible. Unfortunately, now that I am no longer using tables for layout, it ends up rather in-line in Fresco, and presumably also in any other non-CSS browser.

Fresco's buggy Javascript support was causing more problems than NetSurf's complete lack of Javascript. Consequently, there's no use of Javascript on this site.

I'm uncertain of the capabilities of the other main RISC OS browsers (Oregano 3 and the RISC OS port of Firefox), so would welcome feedback if you are using either of these and you notice any rendering issues that you think may be CSS related.

There will probably be issues if you are using Internet Explorer because of its poor conformance to the W3C CSS standards. I considered including the various CSS hacks needed to get IE to conform, though as each version of IE has it's own peculiar set of failings, I decided the effort wasn't worthwhile. I strongly recommend that you switch to using Firefox. On a Mac, I use Safari for most surfing, though turn to Firefox when developing — nuff said.

Finally, a note to RiscPC users. This site is best viewed using 24-bit colour depth - some of the colours used do not map very well into the standard RISC OS 256-colour palette.