How do we do browser compatibility testing for Fedora webpages? I couldn't find notes for this on the wiki, but I may just be missing something.
The question that prompted this (from Sean Daly of the Sugar Labs project, copied):
[http://spins.fedoraproject.org/soas/] is not showing any text on my old Mac running a very old version of Safari (v1.3.2). Displays OK in Firefox though. I don't suppose there is a plain-html version available, or a way to warn users their browser is bad?
--Mel
On 2010-05-28 08:57:57 AM, Mel Chua wrote:
How do we do browser compatibility testing for Fedora webpages? I couldn't find notes for this on the wiki, but I may just be missing something.
The question that prompted this (from Sean Daly of the Sugar Labs project, copied):
[http://spins.fedoraproject.org/soas/] is not showing any text on my old Mac running a very old version of Safari (v1.3.2). Displays OK in Firefox though. I don't suppose there is a plain-html version available, or a way to warn users their browser is bad?
There's no policy or good test matrix (or even minimum set of requirements) for this right now, and I was just griping about some CSS bugs that made it through testing yesterday.
This is definitely something we need to develop a solid set of guidelines.
For Sean's problem, I think it might be that the javascript framework we use isn't supported on Safari (and here's the first item on a potential "hard requirements" list already - all javascript must degrade gracefully when not supported). We noticed that some of the javascript did not have good fallbacks for spins.fp.o, and we've already developed the fixes to ensure that very similar code works properly on fp.o. I think this should just be a matter of making those same fixes on spins.fp.o.
Thanks, and thanks to Sean for the repor, Ricky
On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 7:58 PM, Ricky Zhou ricky@fedoraproject.org wrote:
There's no policy or good test matrix (or even minimum set of requirements) for this right now, and I was just griping about some CSS bugs that made it through testing yesterday.
This is definitely something we need to develop a solid set of guidelines.
Yeah, I agree. We should have some minimum requirements defined on what our sites should work in. In fact, mizmo and I were talking about it about a week or so ago. I just uploaded my notes to this wiki page (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Websites/Fedora_Design_Document) based on a few ideas we were talking about.
If anything, this is a starting point.
Sijis
On Sat, 29 May, 2010 7:38:17, Sijis Aviles sijis@fedoraproject.org wrote:
We should have some minimum requirements defined on what our sites should work in. In fact, mizmo and I were talking about it about a week or so ago. I just uploaded my notes to this wiki page (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Websites/Fedora_Design_Document) based on a few ideas we were talking about.
Hi,
I read the document and immediately several ideas came to mind! Hope these are useful:
- Add sub-headings under 'Basic Usability Standards' to organise information. These could be: Aims, Screen Sizes, Text(Markup), Links(Navigation), Images, Enhancements(Javascript)
- 'The site should be optimized for 1024 x 768'. Probably controversial, but to my mind 'optimized for 1024 x 768' harks back to the days of 'Optimized for Internet Explorer 5.0 at 1024 x 768', etc. I would go for something more like 'Layout should be flexible to adapt to the wide range of modern devices used to access the site. The page should be readable at a minimum 800x480(? - landscape mobile browser) upwards, with 1024 x 768 assumed to be the most common browser window size.' There have been a couple of posts recently about column drop down in smaller window sizes.
Recommend 'Horizontal scrolling should be avoided on all pages at the minimum screen size. Vertical scrolling should be minimized on the common screen size. A long page format can be used, but in-page navigation should be provided at the top of the page.'
- Add 'All images should have height and width attributes to optimise page rendering time' - I think page latency is a very important, but often forgotten, usability issue.
- Add 'All images should be optimized for download size. Recommend PNG for logos and other images with large areas of single colour and sharp borders between colour areas. Recommend JPEG for natural world pictures and other images with wide range of colours and soft transition between colour areas. Don't be afraid to use JPEG for screenshots where the purpose is illustrative.'
- Maybe change 'The site should be optimized for the latest version of Firefox' to something like 'The site should follow HTML 4.01 Transitional and CSS 2.1 standards. Enhancements for the latest browser versions, such as HTML5 and video tag, should degrade gracefully.'
- Change 'The site should use Javscript' to 'The site may use Javascript'
- Make the meaning of accessibility clearer 'The site should be accessible to non-visual browsers, such as speech readers and text-only browsers.' Could also add 'To achieve this content should only be marked up using HTML and not dynamically inserted using Javascript, etc.'
Look forward to any interesting points in response,
Al
On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 6:32 AM, Al Thomas astavale@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
Hi,
I read the document and immediately several ideas came to mind! Hope these are useful:
- Add sub-headings under 'Basic Usability Standards' to organise information. These could be:
Aims, Screen Sizes, Text(Markup), Links(Navigation), Images, Enhancements(Javascript)
Yeah it a draft :)
- 'The site should be optimized for 1024 x 768'. Probably controversial, but to my mind 'optimized for 1024 x 768' harks back to the days of 'Optimized for Internet Explorer 5.0 at 1024 x 768', etc. I would go for something more like 'Layout should be flexible to adapt to the wide range of modern devices used to access the site. The page should be readable at a minimum 800x480(? - landscape mobile browser) upwards, with 1024 x 768 assumed to be the most common browser window size.' There have been a couple of posts recently about column drop down in smaller window sizes.
The intention is to have the website viewable in the most available medias. There are definitely medias she should consider: wide screens, regular screens, netbooks, mobile, print, etc. Related is how to accomplish this.. fluid site or fixed width? In either case, you bring up something to consider.
Recommend 'Horizontal scrolling should be avoided on all pages at the minimum screen size. Vertical scrolling should be minimized on the common screen size. A long page format can be used, but in-page navigation should be provided at the top of the page.'
- Add 'All images should have height and width attributes to optimise page rendering time' - I think page latency is a very important, but often forgotten, usability issue.
Agreed. Its not something I always think about but page loading times has to be near top of the list.
- Add 'All images should be optimized for download size. Recommend PNG for logos and other images with large areas of single colour and sharp borders between colour areas. Recommend JPEG for natural world pictures and other images with wide range of colours and soft transition between colour areas. Don't be afraid to use JPEG for screenshots where the purpose is illustrative.'
- Maybe change 'The site should be optimized for the latest version of Firefox' to something like 'The site should follow HTML 4.01 Transitional and CSS 2.1 standards. Enhancements for the latest browser versions, such as HTML5 and video tag, should degrade gracefully.'
Correct. We should specifically clarify what standards we are going to be using. We should note what we are using to test the website with (browser, OS, screen resolution, device, etc). We do want the website to be functional across all these criteria but we cannot test them all.
- Change 'The site should use Javscript' to 'The site may use Javascript'
I meant to write that.
- Make the meaning of accessibility clearer 'The site should be accessible to non-visual browsers, such as speech readers and text-only browsers.' Could also add 'To achieve this content should only be marked up using HTML and not dynamically inserted using Javascript, etc.'
Look forward to any interesting points in response,
Al
Thank for your feedback.
Keep them coming!
Sijis
On Mon, 2010-05-31 at 02:44 -0500, an unknown sender wrote:
On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 6:32 AM, Al Thomas <astavale at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Hi,
I read the document and immediately several ideas came to mind! Hope these are useful:
- Add sub-headings under 'Basic Usability Standards' to organise information. These could be:
Aims, Screen Sizes, Text(Markup), Links(Navigation), Images, Enhancements(Javascript)
Yeah it a draft :)
- 'The site should be optimized for 1024 x 768'. Probably controversial, but to my mind 'optimized for 1024 x 768' harks back to the days of 'Optimized for Internet Explorer 5.0 at 1024 x 768', etc. I would go for something more like 'Layout should be flexible to adapt to the wide range of modern devices used to access the site. The page should be readable at a minimum 800x480(? - landscape mobile browser) upwards, with 1024 x 768 assumed to be the most common browser window size.' There have been a couple of posts recently about column drop down in smaller window sizes.
The intention is to have the website viewable in the most available medias. There are definitely medias she should consider: wide screens, regular screens, netbooks, mobile, print, etc. Related is how to accomplish this.. fluid site or fixed width? In either case, you bring up something to consider.
This is an interesting tool my colleague Kyle pointed out to me last week:
http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/
It shows statistically based on browser usage stats collected by google how many users you will reach with which resolutions. It does include mobile devices and the like.
Optimizing for a 1024x768 resolution looks like it's good for 70% of users, which I think is likely reasonable.
I think our websites should be fluid when possible. I'd like to make the use of a framework like 960.gs (which has a fluid version) so that a lot of the work to make the site degrade nicely and work fluidly is done for us and we can focus more on rocking out :)
~m
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