Standards

These pages use HTML and CSS conformant with the standards indicated by the icons in the bottom-right corner. For CSS this is now level 2.1. Due to IE6, one compromise has been made with strict XHTML 1.0, though. IE6 reacts to the presence of encoding information by going into "quirksmode", emulating IE5, so this information has been omitted, generating warnings from W3C validation that affect the four pages at this website which show tables.

Browsers and testing

The pages have been tested with Internet Explorer IE7 and IE6, Mozilla Firefox 3.5, and the latest version of Chrome which seems to be 3.0, and have been found to look, feel and behave in virtually the same way with these browsers. This is partly due to the two latter's high degree of conformance to web standards, partly to a major patch by Dean Edwards that makes IE appear to conform to web standards, and it means that the pages are likely to behave reasonably in other leading and standard conformance-seeking browsers. If you discover that this is not the case, I would very much like to hear about it. If your browser is old or quirky, do download a brand new one for free. Takes just a couple of minutes and this fine new browser will simply import your great collection of bookmark favourites.

Javascript

If Javascript is switched off on your machine, you probably won't notice any difference other than that the website search function won't work. Some nice input validation popup boxes will fail to appear but there is no functionality loss because validation is backed up server-side. However, if you are using Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) and have javascript switched off, you will not be able to see the pull-down menus that extend from the menu bar when the mouse hovers over it. In that case, you might switch javascript on, get yourself a contemporary browser, or both.

Ongoing work

Ongoing work on this website addresses multimodality and for-all-users issues, among other things. Development of modality theory continues and new results will be presented both at this website and at the website for the Multimodal Usability book.

In case of any questions or comments regarding the usability of this website, don't hesitate to contact us.