Website interoperability and standards compliance are touted as important features for most websites these days, but many sites still buck the
trend. What is interoprability? Why, and how, should you achieve it?
In this guide I will try to give you the basic tools to make sure your site
is, and continues to be, interoperable.
Interoperability, in this case, refers to the ability of a web-site to be accessed by as diverse an audience as possible. In this instance when I use the word 'audience' I refer not to the people who are using your web-site but instead to the hardware and software that interprets and presents the data to them.
With the number of alternative Operating Systems on the rise every day and the use of Web enabled appliances and portable devices, like the Wii and the iPhone, becoming more commonplace, making sure your website will work properly regardless of the web-browser or OS used is becoming much more important.
If the current trend continues then soon a significant percentage of hits will be coming from more obscure browsers and operating systems. One good example of this is the variant of the Opera web-browser that is built into the Wii console.
If your site isn't designed with interoperability in mind then you may miss out on the additional traffic that you could receive from this growing population and from existing web-goers who use an alternative OS or web-browser.
A good example of a missed opportunity along these lines is the many sites who provide free online backup services, almost all of which require
you to be using Windows for their service to work.
By investing a little more time into developing a generic browser agnostic solution compared
to their current solutions they could be tapping into the alternative OS market whose population is much more aware of the need to regularly backup
your important data.
Producing an interoperable site is fairly straightforward as long as you are willing to stick to a few basic guidelines:
Using proprietary extensions that exist only in some web-browsers is the shortest course to sure-fire disaster as far as interoperability is concerned. Even seemingly innocuous things like Internet Explorer's <marquee> tag (which I willingly admit I used rather liberally in my youth) can have unforeseen consequences on the layout of your page.
By sticking to standards compliant methods like XHTML, CSS and the Javascript DOM you will not only make sure you web-site is a interoperable as possible you will also push the development teams behind the browsers to make sure their rendering / scripting engines comply to the standards as thoroughly as possible.
The term hack in this instance refers to any coding method which is designed to trick different browsers into reading only certain parts of a file. Hacks like the CSS underscore trick not only stop your code from being compliant with web-standards they also undermine your ability to foresee how each browser is going to handle your code.
If you design you website to be accessible by the people with the oldest hardware / software then you go a good way to making sure that everybody will be able to use your site the same way.
- Make sure your site is usable with screen resolutions of at least 1024x768 or even lower if you are targeting the mobile or embedded markets.
- Make sure your site works with any scripting disabled. For example: if your navigation only works when Javascript is enabled then you are effectively cutting yourself off from most web-enabled mobile devices.
- Make sure your site is usable with images disabled. This also goes a long way to making sure people who access the web via a screen reader are able to use your site.
Testing is the most vital step in the whole process. Testing a site in a variety of browsers at each stage of your design process is well worth the effort and will often help you iron out bugs you may not even have known were there. This sort of testing also quickly informs you of the best and quickest way to achieve a desired result across a variety of browsers.
Designing a site and its features with interoperability in mind is great but it means very little unless you thoroughly test it to make sure you have achieved your goal.
In short: Making sure your site is interoperable not only widens your current audience but also helps to make sure that you will get the full advantage of any new ones. Designing for interoperability helps perpetuate web-standards and goes some way to ensuring that you meet the requirements for accessibility standards.