The principle goals of these web pages are to validate to "XSLT 1.0 Strict" and meet the Web accessibility Initiative (WAI) AAA requirement.
Since WAI AAA compliance is complete, there exists no "text-only" version of this page. Also JavaScript DHTML is widely used on the pages without breaking this compliance, because the pages will still function even if JavaScript is unavailable. Heavy use of CSS is employed, but once again, if your browser doesn't support CSS (e.g. Lynx), you will see a neatly organised page.
The design philosophy is that the pages should look and work correctly on standards compliant browsers, and should be usable on as many browsers as is possible. All features of the page work correctly in the latest version of IE for Windows, Firefox, and Mozilla/Netscape, and I recommend that if you don't have the latest version of your preferred browser, that you upgrade if you can.
IE 5.5 and above on Windows should work correctly. IE 5.0 works correctly but the page rendering is slightly faulty. The Apple Mac versions of IE use a completely different rendering engine with its own quirks. I haven't been able to verify whether the pages display OK with those.
Opera has a few difficulties with the menuing. There are some work-arounds in the javascript to support Opera 8, however it appears to get confused if the same menu option is clicked twice in a row. Opera 7 is even more confused by the menu so to avoid this, the whole page scrolls rather than the content area.
All versions of Firefox on Windows should work correctly.
Konquerer on Fedora Core 4 Linux works OK except that some of the links on the side menu don't work. Firefox on Linux works correctly.
Safari on the Mac hasn't been tested. Safari 3 (3.0.4) for Windows has been tested and appears to work correctly.
Netscape 7.1 and Mozilla 1.7 work correctly and earlier versions may do so. However Netscape 6.x had some serious CSS difficulties in general and should be avoided.
The page will display in perfectly readable form in Netscape 4.x although some of the links on the side menu won't work. The compliance requirements above preclude improvements here. The issue menu (i.e. the page tabs) will work fine.
The page will display in usable form in non-CSS browsers, i.e. Netscape 3.x, Lynx etc.
Some of the newsletters are initially created in Adobe InDesign CS from text fragments and pictures supplied by email. The photographs and clipart are often modified in CorelDraw 9 and/or Adobe Photoshop. The page elements are tagged up and then put into and ordered structure within InDesign and then exported page as XML. Other pages are created directly in XML, using a common schema.
When the page is requested, the XML file is loaded into ASP.NET which applies a standard XSL transformation to it, converting it into XHTML 1.0 Strict. This output is sent to the browser.
Nick Stimpson
