This site, as almost every site I mantain, is meant to be readable with any browser without special issues, anyway there are a few points worth mentioning that may allow a smoother visit.
Hints
Alternate Stylesheets
In most of my pages I've made use of the "alternate stylesheet" feature to allow the user to choose between a "nice" presentation and a simple, straightforward one, that may be better suited for certain uses like printing. Not all browsers support this feature, but if you're using one that does it will have an option like "Use Style" that allows you to switch between stylesheets for the page you're currently viewing.
If you want to change the default stylesheet to use on all pages, you can do so from the Settings section: this requires cookies (no personal informations are collected or recorded, only the style number).
On my pages you'll usually find:
- a "default" or "enhanced" style, with a nice visual presentation suitable for common modern visual browsers, some layout structure etc;
- a "simple" one, with colours, some formatting, but a straight layout suitable also for lower (e.g. 640x480 or less) resolutions;
- a "print" one, with black text on white background, smaller fonts and some added text that could add usefulness to a non-hypertextual version, such as the destinations of external links;
These are informations about browser support for these features:
- Firefox 1.0
- Full support; alternate sheets available through View -> Page Style menu.
- Mozilla 1+
- Full support; alternate sheets available through View -> Use Style menu.
- Opera 7
- Alternate sheets support available through View -> Style menu (must be in Author mode and not User Mode).
- Konqueror 3.5
- Full support; alternate sheets available through View -> Use Stylesheet menu.
- Safari 1.2
- Full support for the stylesheets, does not seem to support the alternate stylesheet feature.
- Camino 0.8.4
- Full support for the stylesheets, does not seem to support the alternate stylesheet feature.
- Explorer
- Does not support some minor feature even in the enhanced stylesheet (nothing that will prevent page browsing), does not support text adding in the print stylesheet, does not seem to support the alternate stylesheet feature.
Language
Most of this website is in english; some sections in italian have a short english abstract in the second paragraph, with the language change marked with the proper html and xml attributes.
Browser Choice
While most browser will show the contents of these pages, some of them may give a better looking visual result, while others may have some minor issue; here I'll list what I know about the subject.
- Firefox
- This is probably the best browser you could use to browse this site: it has a good standard implementation and is available for most architectures. It is one of the browser I use while developing this site.
- Mozilla 1+
- Another good choice, if you appreciate having an all-in one suite for most of your internet needs instead of standalone lighter programs like Firefox, Thunderbird etc. All stable releases should be fine, as well as most of the 1.x developement ones; there may be issues with pre-1.0 releases. It used to be one of the browsers I used while developing this site, before I switched to Firefox.
- Netscape Navigator 7+ or 3-
- New versions (7+) are Mozilla based, so they should be good (see above); old versions (3-) don't have any stylesheet support, so there are good chances that the page will be well navigable just like on text only browsers, unless there are issues with xml sintax (but care has been taken to minimize them).
- Netscape Navigator 4 or 6
- This is hell. Please, if you use Netscape Navigator
4 change your browser NOW. You can upgrade to a recent version of either
Netscape Navigator or Mozilla, a recent version of some lightweight
browser (there are also some that are Gecko based like Mozilla),
or if you can't do any better downgrade to Netscape Navigator 3 or
use a text only browser. Please!
This version has a broken and primitive stylesheet implementation that will probably give worse results than no implementation at all, with big problems even with font sizes. If you can (I don't remember if it is possible), switch stylesheets off, and you'll be able to browse the page, but I don't give any guarantee on the result.
Netscape Navigator 6 is based on an early beta release of Mozilla, so it may work or it may not. I believe that my pages shouldn't give big issues, but its general instability won't suggest it as a good choice. - Internet Explorer
- Recent versions of this browser seem to render
the page in an ok way, only with small aestetical issues that may
let you think that the author of this page has a really bad taste.
It is nothing critical, only if you have other choices I suggest
to consider them instead of it. I don't know about older versions.
The Mac version is, as usual, slighty better, but still misses the added text feature in the print stylesheet, and I see no reason not to use another browser like Safari. - Safari
- Has a good standard support and works just fine, except for the missing alternate stilesheet support. I've used it myself when developing the site, toghether with Mozilla.
- Camino
- This Gecko based browser for Mac OS X has a good standard support and works just fine, except for the missing alternate stilesheet support.
- Konqueror
- Has good standard support and works fine: it's one of the browsers I use when developing the site.
- Opera
- Seems to be ok.
- Links
- A great textual browser with table support, it should be a good choice. I don't know about more recent versions (in framebuffer graphical mode).
- Lynx
- Probably the most famous textual browser, should be a good choice.
- OpenMoko browser
- This site has been tested with the OpenMoko browser on 2007-11-14 and it was quite readable even on the small display, except for a few quirks. Using the simple style could improve the navigation.
Extensive testing
These are the browsers I've made some extensive testing of the site with, and the results I've had.