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When designing this site, I made it a priority to take advantage of as many new technologies as possible, while still maintaining cross browser compatability and minimising impediments to users of older browsers. To reduce download times, I have taken great pains to go easy on the images while using stylesheets to provide a splash of color. Unfortunately, The navigation images on the index page are in PNG format, which can only be viewed by fourth generation browsers. However, since the two dominant browsers are both free and Navigator/Communicator in particular is available for almost every concievable OS out there, I trust that this won't be a major issue. Since Javascript is an open standard and has been built into Navigator from version 2 and into IE from version 3, I took the liberty of using it quite liberally throughout my site. I am aware that some browsers (notably versions of Opera prior to 3.5 & Netpositive 2.x) cannot handle it so I have ensured that it is not essential to navigate around and enjoy my site. I originally did not want to implement frames on my site but they were neccesary for the Site Info section. The only thing that I overlooked was the fact that some people still use a screen resolution of 640x480. I was so sure that everyone had begun using at least 800x600 (SVGA) that I neglected to test my pages with VGA resolution. As a result, some pages look ghastly at that resolution. I have not had any reports of people experiencing problems with color depth, as 256 colors is sufficient for viewing all my pages. That's all for now.
I write all my HTML in a simple text editor. This allows me to write 'clean' code that is very easy to understand if you open it in a text editor and displays very fast in a browser. As a result of having developed and continuing to maintain this site on in several different OSes, these text editors can vary from hour to hour. Fortunately ASCII stays the same (except for that CR+LF issue) no matter what OS you happen to be using :-) When I first started (sprint '99), I did all my image editing in Corel PhotoPaint 7. Since then, I have not had to do any further graphics verk so the Gimp has not come into play yet.
I do my primary development using Netscape Communicator/Navigator 4.x as a testing environment. However, I eventually test the site in every browser/OS combo at my disposal. The site is generally tested for compatability with the following browser/OS combos: