Tips for Business Websites

Browsers

It is important that your pages work with all major browsers and operating systems. You can't assume that everyone is running Netscape 2.0 under Windows 95.

Many users on Canada Freenet use Lynx, and have no graphical capability. You must include a text version of all critial content; ideally you should check your pages with Lynx yourself.

Many larger organisations may use a mainframe system with ASCII or X terminals, and have their Internet access through that. There is a good chance that Mosaic and possibly Netscape are available, but it is not guaranteed. Relying on Netscape HTML extensions for content is not a good idea. Tables, particularly, present problems with some versions of Mosaic which cannot display links inside tables. Hopefully this deficiency will be fixed soon.

Viewers

As above, you cannot assume that everyone is running Windows 95, or even uses an Intel platform. Some file types, such as GIF, JPEG or PostScript may be assumed to be supported by all graphic capable platforms. Others, such as DVI, TeX, Acrobat, cannot. This is particularly true of animation formats. MPEG players are fairly widely available, but viewers for AVI, QuickTime, etc. are sometimes difficult to obtain due to licensing problems.

Audio

The MIME audio/basic type is widely supported, and is the only type which will play directly on some older Sun platforms. Conversion routines are widely available for Microsoft WAV format, and to some extent Silicon Graphics AIFF format. Other formats are less portable, particularly proprietary formats such as RealAudio ".ra". Although the proprietary format may offer some advantage in performance, it is wise to provide duplicates in more common, freely available, formats as well.