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Home / Web Standards Compliance
Web Standards Compliance
Why am I viewing this webpage?
You have been redirected to this webpage because your browser identified itself as non-W3C compliant. This means your browser does not support (or only supports few) web standards. This website makes extensive use of web standard code and you will not be able to view the presentation correctly.
Once you have upgraded your browser to a W3C-compliant version (see list below), you will be able to access this website.
What are web standards?
The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), along with other standards groups and bodies including the Web Standards Project, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which we call "web standards" are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web.
Designing and building with these standards delivers sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Sites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market.
Most browsers released prior to 2000 do not uniformally support web standards despite the fact browser manufacturers such as Netscape and Microsoft have been working to develop such standards with the W3C since its inception in late 1994. This divergence has added up to 25% in additional website maintenance costs, fostered major browser incompatability issues often forcing designers to chose their favourite presentation, and has frequently hurt people with disabilities or special needs.
How can you help?
You might consider upgrading to any of the following browsers. Doing so will improve your web experience, enabling you to use and view sites as their creators intended.
Internet Explorer 6.0
IE6 for Windows delivers fine support for HTML 4, XHTML 1, CSS1, and other important standards including the W3C DOM. Don't worry if you don't know what that means; the people who build your websites know. The browser is available free of charge. Earlier versions of IE for Windows including 5.0 and 5.5 are good, but their standards support is not as complete as that offered by IE6.
Mozilla 1.0
Mozilla 1.0 is the browser built by the people who build Gecko, the rendering core of modern Netscape browsers, and several others. No browser does a better job of standards compliance, and Mozilla also includes all the usual add-ons like mail, news and chat.
Internet Explorer 5.0 (Macintosh)
IE5 Macintosh Edition, released in March 2000, provides superb support for key web standards (CSS, HTML, XHTML, PNG, ECMA-262, DOM1HTML) and an elegant user experience. IE5.1 for Mac OS X and Mac Classic, released December 2001, improves on its predecessor's standards support. Available free of charge, the browser includes an innovative feature ("Text Zoom") that greatly improves the accessibility of any text published on the Web. Mozilla and Netscape 6/7 also offer Text Zoom.
Netscape 6/7
Based on the Gecko rendering engine in Mozilla (see above), Netscape 6/7 complies with important web standards such as CSS and XHTML, and includes full support for XML and the DOM. These technologies can help web builders create powerful sites. The browser is available free of charge. Netscape 6.2 fixes bugs in earlier releases, and adds support for Mac OS X. An experimental Netscape 7 release is also available.
Opera 6
Opera supports many key web standards and a variety of computing platforms. Opera 6 for Windows, released 13 November 2001, is the company's flagship (and most advanced) browser. Its lead designer was the inventor and co-author of the CSS1 standard. The browser, which works well even on older PCs with limited power, is available free of charge. A pay version is also available. Opera supports Windows, Linux (beta, but works very well), and Mac OS (Version 5.0), and will soon support the OS/2, EPOC, and BeOS platforms.
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announcements
November 7, 2009
The OCSTRC underlying structure has been upgraded
and deployed. New Ontario course codes are being
added. Send bug reports to egnatoff@queensu.ca.
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