Compliance Testing (19th October 2004)
My parents kept our old P100 machine running Windows 95 to keep our financial details on because it has never been connected to the internet. It has Internet Explorer v4.7 whilst our newer computer is an AMD1400XP running Windows XP. It is connected to the internet and has Internet Explorer v6 but I have also installed FireFox v0.9 and Opera v7.
My pages do not render identically in all the browsers due to their differing levels of support for 'Cascading Style Sheets' as well as subtle differences in how they measure margins, padding and line spacing. However, the site does not get broken in any of these browsers and even stuff like the floating images works correctly in them all.
To test how it looks without CSS, I renamed the file so that it broke the link and then tried using the site as usual on the Windows 95 machine with IE4. What basically happened is
- A serif font became used instead of sans-serif.
- Header and footer became left aligned instead of central.
- Tables shrunk to their minimum size instead of filling the screen and lost their borders.
- All elements used large, default margins above and below themselves.
- Floated images became left aligned with one row of text beside them, the rest wrapping underneath.
- The absence of the code and quote
boxclass meant that such samples were formatted the same as normal text.
The alignment changes do not make much difference to the usability of the site, nor does the collapsing tables. I thought the lack of formatting for the samples would be a problem but after checking around more thoroughly I found that it remains clear which things are samples due to me always preceeding them with sentence ending with a colon.
Therefore, I think that the site performed fine. c{:¬)