Macedonian and Balkan Folk Music

Information about this Web Site

While redesigning this site, I did a lot of reading about what professional web developers do to make their sites accessible to users on different browsers who are viewing content on different sized screens. I had made my first all-CSS site last year for an organization I volunteered for and really support the ideals of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in their mission and recommended standards.

I’ve tried to make this a “liquid” site, which changes as the viewer resizes it, and with font size in “ems” so that viewers change text to what they wish, and the pages resize accordingly. I don’t know how successful I’ve been; it's not been that easy for me to do (this is definitely not my day job!), and it’s a different philosophy from the web-page-as-design-layout take that many, if not most pages seem to exhibit. Despite some misgivings, I’ve decided to stick with this “viewer-in-control” stance and give it a try. I'd like to hear what you think of it.

Anyway, in the course of my research, I discovered that these very intelligent and skilled web developers had had to resort to what they termed “hacks” to make various versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser work the same as most other familiar browsers. This I found ironic, as Microsoft was one of the first to implement CSS in its browser years ago. The latest version of Explorer (7) apparently fixes some of the more egregious problems, but they still haven’t gotten it right. And now the developers have to fix their past hacks while creating new ones.

What it comes down to for me is this: I am unwilling to spend the many hours it would take me to research and try to hack my own site. I don’t depend on either web development or the income from this site for a living, so I can afford to say this. It took me quite a while to get this site to work on different screen sizes, allowing the user to adjust some of the variables, and the site works on 7 different browsers on two platforms and has valid CSS and XHTML. (I am aware that many of the browsers share the same underlying technology.) I don’t see why everyone else can make their browsers conform to recommended standards and Microsoft can’t or won’t. I had to change my design on the home page just to make sure Explorer users would be able to read it. I left other pages alone.

There are other browsers available, and I encourage you to give one of them a try. In the meantime, I take my hat off to all the developers doing extraordinary work to provide flexible, accessible web sites to users, and who have come up with ingenious ways to force a poor but still widely-used product such as Explorer to be useful to everyone

Here are a few other browsers (alphabetically listed) for you to try. All are free unless noted otherwise. This site works on all of them.

For those interested, Wikipedia has an article listing many more browsers catalogued by type and technology base. Darrell Knutson has posted a list of 105 browsers for the Mac alone. Finally, W3C has a page devoted to alternative browsing methods.