5.  How can I keep my Web pages robust?

Section Summary

• What makes Web pages fragile?

• How can I avoid making my pages fragile?

• Where else can I find information about robust page design?

What makes Web pages fragile?

Web pages, or the Web site consisting of a group of linked Web pages, are "broken-by-design" if they do not make reasonable compromises among the goals discussed in the previous section. Web pages are "fragile" if they work with some browsers, but not with others, i.e., if they are easy to break. In a nutshell, Web pages will break if they

• contain tags that the browser doesn't understand, or if they

• have been composed with unjustified assumptions about
  • the browser,
  • its configuration, or
  • the hardware it is running on.

We will spend some time discussing the methods you can use to avoid creating fragile Web pages.

A very convenient feature of HTML is that browsers will ignore tags that they don't understand. This means that it is easy to predict what all older browsers will do in the presence of a new tag, so that it is possible to make correct decisions about whether, and how, to use new tags.

As you browse the Web with a modern graphical browser, you will see many pretty pages, whose authors have done things you will be tempted to emulate. In many cases, however, you will find that you must make a compromise between page designs that are pretty on some browsers, but fragile (and therefore ugly or non-functional on other browsers), and robust page designs whose appearance may be more "sturdy and functional" than "elegant." Often you will find that for a comparable or only slightly greater initial effort, it will be possible to create page designs that are both robust and elegant.

As you make your choices about the design of your pages, you should keep clearly in mind the user population you expect to be serving; for example:

• If you are a faculty member teaching a class that is scheduled to meet in a lab with large-screen, ethernet-connected machines that are running the latest version of Netscape, and you are confident that your students won't want to study those Web pages by dialing in from their off-campus apartments, then you can be quite uninhibited about the HTML features you use.

• If you are writing departmental pages that you expect to be visited by prospective students and their parents from around the country, many of whom may well be using freenet or other accounts that provide only text-based access (e.g., Lynx), then you need to be very careful to write robust pages.

Additional information on the demographic characteristics of a large population of Web surfers and their hardware and software can be found on-line for those using Netscape 3 or later (it crashes Netscape 2) at the Georgia Tech survey page; look particularly at the most recent survey.

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How can I avoid making my pages fragile?

The methods that you should use to avoid making your pages fragile depend on the technique you use to create and modify your HTML files:

• An ordinary word processor, directly working with the HTML tags:

  This method takes more learning at the start, because you must confront the raw HTML, but there are no concealed assumptions, so you retain complete control.

• A modern word processor with HTML import and export capability, such as Microsoft Word 97 or WordPerfect 8:

  This method provides a good quick transition from an existing written document to put it on the Web, but the resulting page will almost always be riddled with fragilities because of the word processor's assumptions.

• A "WYSIWYG" HTML editor, such as Adobe PageMill, AOLPress, Claris HomePage, or Netscape Navigator Gold:

  This method is quick, and once you learn the ins and outs of the particular software package will usually let you produce a robust page, but you are still vulnerable to the software's hidden assumptions.

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Where else can I find information about robust page design?

• This section of the talk is an abbreviated form of a longer Ohio University document that includes links to specific directions for working around the vulnerabilities of various editors.

• Ohio University World Wide Web Guidelines

• Ohio University Content Standards

• The "Best Viewed with Any Browser" Campaign

• Accessible Site Design

• For further information on considerations in designing Web pages that are generally accessible, take a look at http://trace.wisc.edu/world/.

• Here are pages from two other people dealing with the excessive use of "under construction" images:
  • http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/~gordon/atwork/

  • http://www.andrews.edu/~rickyr/noconst.html

• Microsoft Windows 95 users can quickly switch screen resolution, if their hardware supports it, by using the QuickRes tool that Microsoft provides (free, but unsupported).

    

Dick Piccard revised this file (http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~piccard/oacrao98/fragile.htm) on November 3, 1998.

Please E-Mail comments or suggestions to "piccard@ohio.edu".