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.