Viewable with Any Browser: Campaign

“Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.”
— Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996

If you’ve come to this page, you’re probably curious about the “Viewable With Any Browser” themed button on it. Here’s my explanation. I am very unhappy with the current trend towards web sites designing only for specific browsers and ignoring others. It’s extremely annoying to me to visit a web site and to find that I’ve been rejected until I come back with Netscape or Internet Explorer. It’s also annoying to visit web sites that allow you in with any browser, but rely heavily on tags only supported in a few popular browsers, or leave out support for text browsers.

I would like to reverse this trend. I know I can’t change the web by myself, but every little bit counts, and this is my vote for a platform independent, non-browser specific World Wide Web. So, I have displayed the “Viewable With Any Browser” button to emphasize that I try to create my web sites to be viewable in all browsers, and totally functional. Some pages may look better in some browsers than others, but they should all be readable by any browser. I try to only use browser specific tags in appropriate manners, and only if there’s a good reason for their use, and in the cases in which I’ve used tags which only some browsers support, such as image maps, frames, Java, etc., I have done my best to utilize the graceful degradability options available in HTML or provided alternatives for browsers that don’t support them. Please let me know if you come across anything on my web pages that doesn’t work in your browser (be specific about what browser you’re using and what didn’t work) and I’ll try to fix it.

I invite anyone who wants to join in this effort to go ahead and copy any of the many graphics provided by participants in the campaign, which are available on the Any Browser Graphics page. If you feel like creating other graphics for the campaign, please do! (and let me know if I can provide that graphic for others to use). I would prefer if you linked the graphic to this page, so that people know what it’s all about, or create your own page about this campaign, but if you don’t want to that’s cool with me too.