Accessibility Information

Importance of Standards

.Netoogle realizes that visitors to our site will use many different types of browsers to view our content. Each browser performs differently, and no two browsers will render most Web pages exactly the same.Visitor needs will vary from the use of handheld and mobile devices, operating systems, visual readers, the ability to easily change font size, or just differences in preferences, such as those who prefer to use a standards compliant browser versus Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Since the infancy of the Web, many, many designers have striven to build pixel perfect (a/k/a picture perfect) sites. In order to achieve this, most have at one time or another resorted to using tables to layout content. There are four problems with this.

First, there are considerable differences in the manner in which different browsers rendered content inside tables.

Second, using talbes for laying out a Web page required the addition of significant amounts of code that had to be downloaded with each page. This was and still is a significant issue for those who access the Internet via dial-up, since it took that much longer to download pages.

Third, once a page was downloaded, it took longer to load it in the browser. When a browser downloads a page, it immediately renders the page, simulataneously styling the content.¹ However, a browser will not render a table until the entire table has been downloaded. The end result is that the increased mark-up required by the tables increased the download time to begin with, and then the page rendedered more slowly, because it would not begin until all elements of the table had been downloaded.

Fourth, the semantic markup of the page made little since to browsers that did not use style sheets. These layouts tended to be difficult to navigate for those that relied on assistive devices, and entirely different pages had to be rendered for visitors using hanheld devices.

With all of this in mind, the .Netoogle Web site has been designed and validated according to the XHTML 1.0 Strict standard as published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and every effort has been made to employ semantically accurate mark-up. Furthermore, all layout and presentation has been controlled with CSS style sheets, with separate stylesheets being provided to legacy browsers, printers, mobile devices, screen readers, and other assistive devices.

Limitations of This Site

Where We Fall Short

While we make every effort for meeting our presentation goals, occassionally we experience competing objectives. Unfortunately, this will cause a few problems for some of our users. It is our argument that style should always be separate from content, but some rules of XHTML pose an obstacle with regard to the the sample search forms and the preview search form on the generator. Specifically, XHTML will not permit us to embed a style sheet directly in the page where we can easily make it available to our users. Instead, style rules are embedded in the elements themselves. Therefore, for all stylesheets but the default, the sample search forms will not be displayed.

We Strove for Standards Compliancy

What Should You Do

First, please upgrade your browser to the latest version. Most browsers periodically release bug fixes. Some of these fix rendering quirks, but more importantly, they fix security flaws too. This is especially important if you are using Internet Explorer. This browser is known to be so insecure that the United States Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) in June 2004 wrote Use a different web browser.

There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, the DHTML object model, MIME type determination, the graphical user interface (GUI), and ActiveX. It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different web browser, especially when browsing untrusted sites. Such a decision may, however, reduce the functionality of sites that require IE-specific features such as DHTML, VBScript, and ActiveX. Note that using a different web browser will not remove IE from a Windows system, and other programs may invoke IE, the WebBrowser ActiveX control, or the HTML rendering engine (MSHTML).

Lucky for all of us then that the Mozilla project released its free, next-generation browser Firefox in November of 2004. There are several reasons why you should consider using Firefox.

1. It was designed from the beginning with security in mind.
2. Early development versions already had pop-up blocking.
3. It is fast, fast, fast, and lightweight.
4. It understands its users.
5. Tabbed-browsing greatly reduces clutter.
6. It runs on all versions of Windows since Windows 95, Linux, and Macintosh.
7. It is 100% standards compliant. Need we say more?

© Copyright 2003-2010 by Hodgenville.net - All Rights Reserved.
.Netoogle and the .Netoogle logo are trademarks of Hodgenville.net.
XHTML 1.0 Strict.