This page will answer frequently asked questions about the Web Devout site.
This site puts a strong focus on promoting web standards. Browsers that are behind in standards support are naturally shown in a poor light on this website.
At this time of writing, Internet Explorer is significantly behind the rest of the major competition in standards support due to several years of no development work on the Internet Explorer platform, and although Microsoft has since begun developing it again, the rate of improvement has been roughly equal to that of other competitors like Firefox and Opera. This means that it remains behind the other browsers by roughly the same amount at any given point in time. Although improvement of the Internet Explorer platform is very much encouraged, these development efforts don't change the fact that Internet Explorer has so far continued to be a bottleneck in the use of modern standards, and this is reflected in the content of this site. If Internet Explorer were to catch up to the competition in standards support, this site would appropriately regard those changes.
Rather than using a single standard test suite, a large number of custom tests are made on-the-spot for each feature in order to seek out elusive bugs that formal test suites often miss.
If the browser appears to support the feature perfectly according to the relevant web standard specification, it is given a “Y” rating. If it doesn't appear to recognize the feature at all, it is given an “N” rating. Otherwise, it is given an “I” rating unless the feature can be broken down into smaller sections clearly illustrated by the specification, in which case the feature is listed as an overall percentage of support for those sections.
Percentages are weighted based on the number of features in the next level of detail. In order to prevent bias, this resource does not attempt to weight features based on perceived real-world importance.
More information can be found in How to interpret these tables and How features are weighted.
None. Although information from this site has been used in a number of books and elsewhere, no money has yet been made on this site and there are currently no plans to profit from it. The site is developed in my spare time and spare money.
This site is designed to be fully usable in standards-compliant browsers and as many less compliant browsers as reasonably possible. Browsers with good support for web standards benefit from some subtle stylistic touch-ups that less compliant browsers such as Internet Explorer don't support without requiring a number of changes to the HTML source. Some of the touch-ups supported by browsers like Firefox and Opera include gloss and shading on various headings and the page background. These are mostly created using generated content and outline features in CSS that Internet Explorer doesn't yet support.
Rather than using a single standard test suite, a large number of custom tests are made on-the-spot for each feature in order to seek out elusive bugs that formal test suites often miss. The number of custom tests is too large to keep an archive of them all, but there are a few public test cases that were made for other purposes.
If you hover your mouse cursor over the browser support ratings, there is often a description available for the bugs. These descriptions are designed such that it should be easy to construct test cases from them.
No. The name “Web Devout” was chosen as a play on “web development” and devotion to the health of the Web. It is not intended to have a religious meaning.
Yes, under the terms of this site's Creative Commons license. The original author must be clearly identified, and there must be a link back to the original article. The new version must also be under the same Creative Commons license, although it may be combined with other content that is not under the same license.
The logo is an arrow representing progress. When the logo was first created, the history of the Web had been popularly broken down into two general periods, often referred to as Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The two dots in the arrow represent these two periods, and the head of the arrow signifies movement beyond.
The logo was also made to resemble a smiling face, giving a feeling of healthiness.
It was chosen as a play on “web development” and devotion to the health of the Web.
The CSS support page is currently split into two sections: CSS 2.1 and CSS 3. Since the CSS 2.0 standard is expected to be completely replaced by the upcoming and better-supported CSS 2.1 standard, my tables don't list features specific to CSS 2.0. The following features of CSS 2.0 were removed in CSS 2.1 due to lack of support or implementation problems:
@font-facecaption-side: leftcaption-side: rightdisplay: compactdisplay: markerfont-size-adjustfont-stretchmarkspagesizetext-align: <string>text-shadowSome of these features have been proposed again in some form for CSS 3. If such features are still in the CSS 3 specifications as the relevant modules arrive at the Candidate Recommendation stage of the standardization process, those features will be added to the CSS 3 support tables.
As a web developer, I benefit from web standards. Standards make my work easier and allow me to better accomplish my goals with a website. It is in my own interest, as well as the interest of all web professionals and users of the Web, to promote the use of standards. I initially decided to make this site to provide two primary services: articles that explain and promote web standards, and tools that help further ease a web developer's work. I personally use the tools on this site, especially the Web browser standards support reference, Webpage test system, and Specification lookup tool. I also regularly help other web developers online, and I frequently link to the various articles on this site to address recurring issues.
In summary, my goal with this site is to increase the understanding and use of web standards and to provide tools that ease the web development process, in order to ultimately improve the experience of web developers and users of the Web.