Imagine you’re preparing a slide presentation to deliver to an audience. But there are a few details about your audience that will affect choices you make in preparing your slides.
First, the audience members each speak a different language – from English to Spanish, French, German and Italian, to Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese and Bengali. Not only that, but you also have to account for the fact that within each language, there are multiple dialects and accents.
As if the language-dialect-accent issues weren’t complicated enough, each member of this audience is also wearing special lenses that limit the type of presentation they can see. Some can only see material that’s rendered for High Definition viewing, while others, only 3-D. Your challenge, as the presenter, is to prepare your slides and spoken material so that every member of your audience receives all parts of your presentation.
Impossible?
The issue of getting a message across to an audience through a complex array of “translation filters” is one that Web designers have to take into consideration at every level of design.
The Web browser is basically a filter that translates the HTML code that defines your site, into designed and formatted Web pages.
A main issue affecting how visitors see your site is that there are (at last count) about 100 different types of Web browsers and many more different versions of those browsers. Added to this, Web designers and developers use HTML standards that are developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which also get updated to different versions.
Of course, it would be a simpler world if only one or two browsers dominated, and everyone kept up with every update. In years to come, we may see better standards that guide browser design, which would resolve most of these issues. In the meantime, designers are called on to build pages that can be viewed with the most-used browsers and at least a couple of different versions of those browsers.
For site owners and designers alike, frustration can quickly mount when a site looks great on one system or browser, and looks completely different on others. Fortunately, there are a few steps to help address, avoid or solve these issues:
- Run your site on different operating systems and different versions of different browsers during beta testing. It’s not unusual to see a Web designer working with two computers, checking to see how a site reads on Mac and PC, using different browsers on both of those systems.
- Keep your design team informed of any concerns you see and take note of the operating system, browser and version you’re using.
- Maintain a dialog with visitors to your site who report any problems viewing your site, making sure to collect OS and browser information from them.
- Bear in mind that maintaining browser compatibility is an ongoing, dynamic process that evolves, as different browser versions and different HTML standards are released.
The main thing to remember is that the “simpler” a site’s design, the less likely it is to have multiple issues on multiple browsers. When it comes to Web design, a couple of basic rules always apply: work with someone who understands the Web, and always remember the importance of balancing style with function.
