Perhaps this is too obvious, but for heaven's sake, people, set your character set correctly. Don't make my browser (or me) guess.
Living for the time being in the third world (though there are certainly far poorer places), I think Netscape 4.75 probably is a little out of date. I haven't seen it in quite a while. IE5.0 is probably a good base, and as far as I can tell, people who don't use IE use Firefox or Mozilla. But that's just Nicaragua. I do like the idea of 'degrading gracefully' in the absence of CSS support. Sites that are written well enough for that are generally also readable in lynx/w3m/links (and presumably TTS browsers) because their HTML is mostly semantic, i.e., UL's for navigation bars. So even if you accept as baseline a CSS-compliant browser, I'd keep that part of 508. That was partly just a brain dump, sorry. Hope it was helpful. Peter On Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 10:13:13AM -0400, Siobhan Green wrote: > Hi all, > > I was wondering what y'alls thoughts are on what the current browser > compliance standards should be for international audiences. I develop > websites for a variety of non-profits which want to ensure the sites are > accessible by the majority of users in developing countries. I know that > the sites need to be low bandwidth, 508 compliant/highly usable. > > For a long time, I have been using Netscape 4.75 as the lowest common > denominator in terms of browser compliance but am wondering if this is > long out of date, especially as this browser is not fully compliant with > CSS 1 (let alone CSS 2, XML or newer HTML standards). The good thing > about 508 compliance is that the site needs to degrade gracefully > without a CSS so I am not worried about a site being totally unusable > (just ugly or harder to use). > > Obviously, if the site is intentionally directed at a specific audience > in a specific country, then we will make the site supportive of that > specific environment. But I also need a general rule of thumb where we > have a broad audience of "Development community" or "General Public". > > Suggestions, thoughts, experiences, all welcome!! > > Siobhan Green _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
