Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Document Authoring

It is important to keep in mind that your primary goal on the Web is to communicate. While it may not be possible to make your site look exactly the same on all browsers, you can be sure your content is accessible and usable, at the very least, by following standards recommendations for marking up your content.

Start with good markup

When an HTML document is written in logical order and its elements are marked up in a meaningful way, it will be usable in even Mosaic 1.0 (try it yourself on the Mosaic emulator at http://Dejavu.org). Plus, you have to figure that if a visitor is using Netscape 2.0, your page won’t look any worse than any other.

Follow accessibility guidelines

The techniques that make your site accessible to people with disabilities also ensure that your site can be viewed on all browsers, including old versions, text-only browsers, and micro-browsers in handheld devices. See Chapter 5 for more information on accessibility.