In the beginning, Web Browsers took HTML pages from the server and rendered them on the users screen. Soon, additional capabilities were added to provide interactivity and more dynamic presentation. These included javascript, the first browser based scripting language which interacted with the html (this is known as dhtml or dynamic html) to provide interactivity and visual effects (e.g. rollover menus). Flash became available as a browser plug-in, allowing for increasingly sophisticated animation to be incorporated into web pages. Other plug-ins allowed other multimedia content to be embedded in web pages. Other scripting languages, such as VBScript(from Microsoft) and ActionScript (for FLASH) became available as well.
As capabilities were added, the HTML behind a web page became increasingly convoluted, difficult to read, test, debug, or maintain. Web Standard technologies were developed to standardize and rationalize the HTML. CSS, or cascading style sheets, allowed developers to separate the instruction of how things should look from the overall structure of the page. XML, which was designed to describe data, was seen as the successor to HTML. Since XML browsers are still not widespread, a form of HTML that was XML-compliant, XHTML, was developed as a transitional improvement to HTML.
This depends on your target audience. There is a huge variety of OS/Browser/Browser Version combinations among the computers accessing the internet, and yet just a few of these account for the overwhelming majority of users. (Here are some recent market share statistics In addition, accessibility for some users is dependent on technologies such as screen readers for the visually impaired. A determination must be made up front concerning what range of browser capabilities will be supported. As you add increasingly complex browser technology (flash, javascript, xml/xslt, etc.), it becomes increasingly likely that you will be excluding some of the users out there. It all comes down to your target audience. Alternate presentation for different browser capabilities is possible and this allows you to provide more complex presentation for those clients capable of it while not excluding others, but this will increase the work of developing and maintaining. All other things being equal, design alternatives favoring accessibility should be favored.
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Page last updated 1/14/2006.
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