Construction and Techniques
The Autistic Cuckoo is built entirely by hand, using the vim text editor. We think that the current graphical tools don't generate web pages of sufficient quality. Their support when it comes to accessibility is also rather limited, to put it mildly.
In order to have a consistent appearance and minimise maintenance, we use PHP to generate the pages on the server. Unfortunately it's too expensive to have access to a MySQL database at our web host, so the whole site is currently file based.
Standards
The PHP scripts perform
content negotiation with the browser, to ascertain which
content type to serve. Modern browsers get
XHTML 1.1,
while older and simpler browsers get trusted old
HTML 4.01 (strict).
No matter which, the markup is used only for semantically
marking
up data. Sometimes, however, we've had to add an occasional
<div> or <span> as hooks
for style rules.
We have strived to validate every single page, to make sure that the markup is correct according to the standards.
Presentation is controlled entirely by style sheets according to CSS 2.1. They validate without errors, although at the time of this writing, the validator validates agains version 2, not 2.1.
Browsers
Of course, The Autistic Cuckoo looks its best in a modern, graphical web browser. We have tried to make sure that the content is readable and usable even for text-based browsers and older graphical browsers. We hope that pages that work in a text-based browser will also work when read aloud by a screen reader, but we have only had the chance to try one of those, and a simple one at that.
Older graphical browsers with insufficient support for style sheets get the pages without any graphic layout, but the content is, of course, the same.
All pages work even if client-side scripting is not supported, or is disabled.
The pages have been checked with the following browsers under Windows XP:
- Mozilla 1.4–1.7
- Mozilla Firefox 0.8–0.9
- Netscape 7.1
- Opera 7.23–7.51
- Lynx 2.8.3
- pwWebSpeak Plus 3.0.48 (screen reader)
- Internet Explorer 5.01, 5.5 and 6
We don't have access to a Macintosh computer, so we haven't been able to try the pages in Mac browsers, except sample pages in Safari 1.2, Opera 7.51 and Camino 0.7 on OS X.
We prefer to code to web standards, rather than adapting the code to buggy browsers, but we have made some accommodations for Internet Explorer simply because of its inexplicable ubiquity.
In many cases, there are features
on the pages, that aren't
available in older browsers – such as Internet Explorer – but
which users with Mozilla, Opera, Safari and Lynx can benefit from.
Those are not vital functions, however.
Well, if IE is used by over 90
per cent of all users, why haven't we optimized
The Autistic Cuckoo for it? Given the choice of limiting the features to
those that IE can handle, or
following the accepted standards (that even Microsoft has approved), we
chose the standards. Since there are much better browsers available, for
free, we don't think there's any reason to waste energy on
circumventing bugs in bad software.