HTML, XHTML and CSS All-In-One for Dummies - Andy Harris [30]
Text-only browsers
Some browsers that don’t display any graphics at all (such as Lynx) are intended for the old command-line interfaces. This may seem completely irrelevant today, but these browsers are incredibly fast because they don’t display graphics. Auditory browsers read the contents of Web pages. They were originally intended for people with visual disabilities, but people without any disabilities often use them as well. Fire Vox is a variant of Firefox that reads Web pages aloud.
Worrying about text-only readers may seem unnecessary because people with visual disabilities are a relatively small part of the population, and you may not think they’re part of your target audience. You probably should think about these users anyway, because it isn’t difficult to help them. There’s another reason, too. The search engines (Google is the main game in town) read your page just like a text-only browser. Therefore, if an element is invisible to a text-based browser, it won’t appear on the search engine.
The bottom line in browsers
Really, you need to have access to a couple browsers, but you can’t possibly have them all. I tend to do my initial development testing with Firefox. I then check pages on IE7 and IE6. I also check the built-in browser on my cellphone and PDA to see how the pages look there. Generally, if you get a page that gives you suitable results on IE6, IE7, and Firefox, you can be satisfied that it works on most browsers. However, there’s still no guarantee. If you follow the standards, your page displays on any browser, but you might not get the exact layout you expect.
Tricking Out Firefox
One of the best features of Firefox is its support for extensions. Hundreds of clever and generous programmers have written tools to improve and alter Firefox’s performance. Three of these tools — HTML Validator, Web Developer toolbar, and Firebug — are especially important to Web developers.
Validating your pages with HTML Validator
In Chapter 2 of this minibook, I explain how important Web standards are and how to use online services such as http://validator.w3.org and HTML Tidy (http://infohound.net/tidy). These are terrific services, but it would be even better to have these validators built directly into your browser. The HTML Validator extension by Marc Gueury is a tool that does exactly that: It adds both the W3C validator and HTML Tidy to your Firefox installation.
When you have the HTML Validator extension (available on this book’s CD-ROM) running, you have an error count in the footer of every page you visit. (You’ll be amazed how many errors are on the Web.) You’ll be able to tell immediately if a page has validation errors.
With the HTML Validator, your View Source tool is enhanced, as shown in Figure 3-4.
Figure 3-4: The HTML Validator explains all errors in your page.
The View Source tool becomes much more powerful when you run HTML Validator, as follows:
♦ Each error is listed in an errors panel. You see this same error list from W3C.
♦ Clicking an error highlights it in the source code listing. This makes it easy to see exactly what line of code triggers each error.
♦ Complete help is shown for every error. The HTML Validator toolbar presents much more helpful error messages than the W3C results.
♦ Automated clean-up. You can click the Clean Up link, and the HTML Validator extension automatically applies HTML Tidy to your page. This can be a very effective way to fix older pages with many errors.
The HTML Validator tool will revolutionize your Web development experience, helping you create standards-compliant sites easily and discover the compliance level of any page you visit. (It’s fun to feel superior.)
Using the Web Developer toolbar
The Web Developer toolbar by Chris Pederick provides all kinds of useful tools for Web developers. The program installs as a new toolbar in Firefox, as shown in Figure 3-5.
Figure 3-5: The Web Developer toolbar