Chris Pollett > About this site

About Chris Pollett's Web Site

Standards, browser compatibility, and accessibility

The look and feel of this site has been relatively stable since I arrived at SJSU in 2001. Circa 2020, the most recent web standard is some variant of XHTML/HTML 5/HTML Living Standard, however, all modern browsers happily render XHTML 1.1. I am mainly writing new pages in HTML Living Standard, but the majority of pages on this site are still XHTML 1.1.

In addition to all modern browsers (Edge, IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome), this site should also work on a variety of very old browsers. For this reason, the HTML, if you view the source, may appear a bit weird. I do tricks to simulate tables for browsers before tables, I use numeric entities &160; rather than   , I am also using tables over divs and styles. Except for the occasional picture, you should be able to view my site in browsers as old as Mosaic 0.6. For older browsers, a slightly different version of my pages are served; however, these pages are still XHTML 1.0 transitional compliant. My site should also work under text-only browsers such as Lynx. You can think of these attempts to make the site more under old browser as analogous to trying to keep a very old car street-worthy for the fun of it.

Some web accessibility tests have been done on this site. All my pages were at some point WAI compliant. If you see something that is causing an accessibility issue, please contact me, and I will try to fix it.

How my site has evolved and links to archived versions.

This web site has gradually evolved over the years. The original homepage written at UCSD dates to late 1994. The links below show how this site has evolved over time:

[SJSU, 2011]
[SJSU, 2006]
[SJSU, 2003]
[SJSU, 2002]
[UCLA, 2001]
[UCLA, 2000]
[Clark University, early 1999]
[Boston University, 1997]
[UC San Diego, early 1997]

The Internet Archive is a good place to hunt down old webpages. It allows you to surf the web as it was in a given year.

If you would like to try surfing the web using an applet based emulator of your favourite early browser check out Deja Vu. If you want to actually download your favourite old browser go to: evolt.org.

Chris Pollett > About this site