Platform Independent Webpages
This is a subject I feel very strongly about, and I am sure you know that if I have been to your site and something didn't work in some obscure browser %) I have spent days making my own website work on several different browsers, and I can confidently say that if you use IE, Netscape (4.7x and up I have tested), Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror, links, lynx, or even your cellphone(!) you will be able to see and navigate my site. Not only does it work on all these platforms, it preserves the same general look. It took a lot of work on my part making sure things worked, and although I don't believe my visitors notice it, I am sure they'd notice it if it didn't work in their browser.
I have had discussions with people about this several times. Usually they are aware of the incompatibility issues but just "don't want to take the time" to make it work on all browsers. In other cases people just weren't aware that certain people couldn't see their pages. To them I always suggest looking at their page in browsers other than Internet Explorer. Have you looked at your page in other browsers lately?
What's Platform Independence?
Platform Independence of your webpage means that you can get on any random computer, whether using Windows, Linux, Mac, or any other various OS's and various browsers, and view your webpage. It's not specific to any OS and/or browser. Your website is independent from the need to be on a certain platform to work well.Major Reasons For Platform Independence:
Corporate Independence
I see sites all the time that have notices on them saying "Best Viewed With Internet Explorer 6.0" or "Best Viewed with Netscape" ... we should not be advertising these Corporations on our site by choice! Just because you can do something "so cool" with a certain browser should not cause you to exclude other users. The use of certain tags is known to create a site that won't work on certain browsers. I think I'd rather have a slightly less impressive site, and do the work to make it as good as I can on all browsers than to exclude some users completely.Take for example filling up your page with a bunch of 500k pictures, people on slower modems arent going to wait 10 minutes for your page to load, so obviously you wouldnt do that, as cool as it would look. You are sacrificing look to have a site that people will be able to view your site.
So why is platform dependence so widespread when use of huge images isn't? My guess is that Microsoft told you it was ok.
Not Taking Users For Granted
This is probably the most important reason for platform independence. Do you like it when you see you've not worked on your site in weeks and the hit counter says something like 100 more hits then the last time you saw it? Of course! Everyone wants traffic to their site... so why exclude certain people? I worked so hard to make my page viewable to all users, even those with textual browsers, because I don't take the users of my site for granted, I appreciate hits, and I want people to explore my site, I want them to come back... they cannot do this if it's impossible leave the front page due to some browser incompatablility issue. Take this one friend I have for example, he specializes in making very cool sites that look good in IE. And agreed, he has some really interesting designs, he's quite good at what he does, but I try to open up the site in Opera and I cant even click on anything, I try with Konqueror and I cannot see the words for the links, I try with Netscape 4.7x and it's completely hopeless! Keeping count? I finally had to open up Mozilla to view the site properly. Would you have tried this hard to view the page if you weren't a friend? Probably not, I wouldn't. It should not be expected of users to go through 4 different browsers before finding one your page works on! There are plenty of sites on the net, as exclusive and impressive as your content may be, if you have trouble getting to it it's generally not worth the time. People are impatient, you must keep this in mind. I have another friend who made his site with php, and I have still to find a browser in linux that properly displays the site. His excuse? Mostly saying that it's a problem with linux, and the browsers available there, that these browsers should keep up with IE... but how is this possible when IE *invents* these tags and rules for webbrowsers?A Platform Independent Web
Someday I'd like to be able to surf the web using my browser of choice and not worry about something not working so that I have to try a different browser. This will probably never happen. As long as there is corporate presence on the web encouraging big sites to use technology that is exclusive to certain platforms we are out of luck. I still have to go into windows to watch most streaming media, I still have to open Mozilla to use anything with intense Flash. But these are corporate sites. We can unite and make our own sites independent of the corporate overlordship. All it takes is a bit of time and research into what will and will not work in different browsers. This doesn't mean you cant use CSS, or Javascript, or cool images maps, it just means you need to be aware of how different browsers work, and know their limitations. And if you REALLY want to do something, make a backup plan so that the site still works somehow in other browsers if something is not supported. For example on one of my sites I have buttons controlled with javascript so that in some browsers when you mouse over them they get darker, in Opera this effect does not work, but the buttons still do.In all I hope this helps you a little to see why it's important to have a webpage that's platform independent, or at least opens your eyes to the need for it. For more information on other people striving for a platform independent web check out http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/