Web browsers have been evolving steadily since last century, adding new features and catering to an ever growing demand for better ways to arrange web pages. After the first of the “browser wars” between Netscape and Microsoft, industry groups got serious about organising the standards for developing new web pages and the web browsers that would display them.
Some years of often tumultuous negotiation between the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and various industry players have left us with some past and current standards, and some developing new standards.
WebAware works to maintain compliance with the standards appropriate for your website or application. We have been working to meet the standards as they have been evolving since last century, and we are aware of the many pitfalls involved in both browser-specific and standards-compliant website development. We regularly check for standards compliance issues when building websites, as non-compliance is an early indicator of cross-browser compatibility problems.
HTML
HTML has been evolving steadily (and unsteadily!) since the inception of the website in the early 1990s. Currently, the most popular web browsers support HTML 4/4.01 and the XML dialect XHTML 1.1, and modern web browsers also support the new and still-evolving industry driven standard HTML5. We have experience building in all of these document types, and with accommodating even Internet Explorer 6 on HTML5 websites.
CSS
With the work towards standardisation of web browsers, Cascading Style Sheets was adopted as a W3C recommendation in 1998 and has been evolving since. There is wide variation in support for the different versions of CSS, especially the latest version, CSS3. WebAware has been incorporating CSS into websites and applications since the turn of the century, and can utilise CSS to realise quite complex designs with basic HTML and CSS along with minimal graphics files.
Javascript and the DOM
Javascript is a collection of scripting languages based on the ECMAScript language, implemented as JavaScript in Mozilla browsers and JScript in Microsoft software. The Document Object Model (DOM) is a standard interface for accessing the different parts of an HTML or XML document. Together, javascript and the DOM allow sophisticated and dynamic web pages that allow for rich interaction with the user.
Web browsers implement javascript and the DOM per the standards to differing degrees, and with differing extensions. Where possible, WebAware utilises the standards-based DOM methods, but can transparently accommodate non-standard web browsers such as Internet Explorer as well.
XML and XSLT
For standard interchange of information between systems we recommend XML where possible. XML is a broadly accepted method of data interchange, and can be accommodated by most systems and computer languages.
Where XML data needs to be transformed for display on a web page, use of XSLT can simplify the task. WebAware has used XML and XSLT in a variety of situations to transform data for presentation on web pages.
JSON
Where data is exchanged solely between a web server and some javascript in a web page, it is often somewhat of an overkill to use XML. JSON was written as a lightweight alternative to XML in these situations, and often proves to be smaller and faster for simple exchanges of data in web pages.
AJAX
AJAX is a broad group of web-based technologies that allows greater interactivity in web pages and applications. It brings together HTML, CSS, javascript and the DOM and adds methods for dynamically requesting data without leaving a web page.
Information can be exchanged in a variety of ways, including plain text, HTML, XML and JSON. WebAware has experience working with all of these methods both in the browser and on the server side.