The many differences between different brands and versions of browsers (not to mention other internet-capable devices) make it impossible to accommodate them all and design a site to display the same visually on every browser. In an attempt to force as many browsers as possible to display pages visually as intended, many web designers have misused formatting, assigning code for layout purposes that was really meant for structural organization.
Not everyone or every device can access the web page visually. There are people with disabilities, but also people using browsers other than the usual ones - including voice browsers that read web pages aloud to people with sight impairments, Braille browsers that translate text into Braille, hand-held browsers with very little monitor space, teletext displays, and other unusual output devices. When structural elements are misused to force layout, those who rely on the code to convey structural coherence are served a jumble of tables with no tabular data, a proliferation of spacer image files, and HTML code saturated with formatting information throughout the content.
It's important to make the page's content itself accessible to all, even if the visual layout cannot be displayed the same to all. Providing text equivalents to images and separating the presentation from the content by means of Cascading Style Sheets allows this accessibility. It leaves the content clean for devices that need to leave out the formatting information, while providing layout instructions to browsers that can interpret them.
The standards of today were developed to be stable across evolving technologies. There won't be a truly consistent web, however, until all web designers adhere to the standards and all users upgrade to standards-compliant browsers.
Trying to present the same visual appearance to a diversity of browser-platform configurations involves a lot of time and energy and frustration. The standards make it much easier to design and maintain web sites, as well as saving on bandwidth. The only reason for not using them would be to attempt to control the visual presentation for users who are still using outdated browsers. Since the percentage of such users keeps decreasing and the percentage of users on non-desktop/non-notebook devices is increasing, that reason is outweighed by the greater benefit of accommodating those with disabilities and device-related limitations - expecially since users can update their browser for free.
Aside from the accessibility benefit for those with disabilities and those with device-related limitations, there are also benefits for non-disabled users on regular computers. One benefit of viewing a standards-compliant web page (even with a non-compliant browser) is that Cascading Style Sheets reduce the file size of a web page, making it faster to download.
If you don't upgrade your browser, you can still access the content of a standards-compliant web page. Its visual presentation may look odd if your browser cannot interpret the formatting code properly, but that's always a possibility when viewing any page (compliant or not) with outdated software.
The benefit of upgrading your browser to a standards-compliant one is that you will see the page as visually designed: text colours, background colours, borders, positioning of text blocks and images.
You can obtain current browsers FOR FREE at the following web sites (there may be some minimum system requirements):
Mozilla (Firefox): http://www.mozilla.com/ — recommended
Netscape: http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/download.jsp
Microsoft (Internet Explorer): http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.asp
— the most common, but not the most standards compliant.
Patch for Internet Explorer 5+: https://sourceforge.net/projects/ie7/
Opera: http://www.opera.com/
World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative: http://www.w3.org/WAI/
The Web Standards Project: http://www.webstandards.org/
This particular page doesn't use any style sheet, so it will display in the default colours of your system. The main pages of the site, however, have been designed with the following colour scheme and layout using cascading style sheets:
The OFTP's logo is an image of a stylized trillium (the province's flower) under a stylized blue "roof." The background is white and the letters OFTP are in blue below the logo.
Across the top of each page, the text "The Ontario Federation of Teaching Parents" is large and green.
The page's text is in blue with green links on a white background. There is an image on the right-hand side of the introductory text, which wraps around it.
Some pages have sidebars with blue or green borders.
Some sidebars may deliberately overlap the dividing section that is found between the introductory text and the main content. This divider is blue with a green border, and contains only a sentence or two.
Below the main content is the menu, in a blue bar with green borders and white text links. Some pages have a submenu underneath the main menu. The submenu is on the white background and the links are green.
Below the menus is a search form on the left and our sponsor's logo on the right. A green line below these separates them from the copyright notice at the bottom of the page.
The code on these pages has been validated, so if you're not seeing them as designed, it means your browser is not standards compliant, is not interpreting the code properly, in other words is no longer up to the job it was intended for. Isn't it time to upgrade?
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