Chapter 83. Testing Your Site


You don't have to be connected to the Web to test a Web site. In fact, you don't have to have Web service at all. Web browsers work perfectly well reading HTML files stored on your personal computer.

GEEKSPEAK

In a Web site, local files are the files that you keep on your personal computer for development and testing purposes. Remote files are the files that you publish to the Web server. The remote files are the ones that your visitors see when they visit your site.


Testing your site from your personal or local files makes good sense. You don't have to be online to test your site, for one thing, and you can make whatever changes you like to your pages without affecting the published version of your site. Your changes don't take effect until you upload the modified pages to the Web server. For this reason, testing locally helps you to improve quality control. You don't have to post buggy or poorly coded pages for the entire world to see. Instead, you iron out the kinks offline and upload your pages after everything is working properly.

To test your site offline, launch a Web browser. Go to the File menu, and choose the Open command. (In Netscape, the command is Open File.) A dialog box appears, asking you to choose the file to open. Browse to your local root folder, and select the home page for your site. The page loads, but remember that it's the local version, not the remote version, or the one on the Web.

It's a good idea to download the latest versions of many different browsers for testing purposes. Even if you're strictly an Internet Explorer person or a diehard Netscape fan in your personal life, as a Web designer, you need to think like your visitors. You never know what browser someone will use to visit your site. Since different browsers display the same Web page differentlyand the differences can be considerableyou want to be on top of any potential problems before you upload the page to the Web.

The most common browser by far is Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows. Whatever you do, make sure your site works well in this browser. Trailing a distant second is the Netscape browser for Windows. While you can probably get away with designing an effective site solely on the basis of how it looks and works in the Microsoft browser, most designers don't consider their sites finished until the pages look right in both IE and Netscape. In Europe, the Opera browser for Windows is quite popular, so sites with a large international audience are wise to take Opera into account.

FAQ

What kinds of links work when I test my site offline?

Document-relative links work just fine when you test the local version of your site. However, absolute links require a Web connection, and root-relative links only work on a Web server. See Topic 61 for a discussion about the various types of link paths.


Visit www.netscape.com/ to download your free copy of the Netscape browser, and go to www.opera.com/ to download your free copy of Opera.

FAQ

What about Mac browsers? What about Linux browsers? What about alternative Windows browsers?

As cruel as it may sound, there simply aren't enough non-Windows, non-Microsoft, non-Netscape machines on the Web to make a statistical difference. If you're building a general-purpose site, don't feel compelled to test your site in a Macintosh browser, for instance. If you have access to a Mac browser, by all means, test. But don't think that you need to buy a Mac just to make sure that your site works properly in Mac browsers.

Netscape and Opera are the biggie alternatives to the Microsoft browser, but they aren't the only ones. Alternative browsersmost notably the open-source darling Mozilla, the post-browser-wars form that the Netscape project has takenappeal to the lifestyles and philosophies of an all-too-small user base of early adopters, original Web heads, and boundary pushers.

If the Web had never exploded into the mainstream as it did, you would be designing sites for browsers such as these. But, as fate (or, more predictably, commerce) would have it, the Web became a popular medium, and the vast majority of its users know no more about its technical workings than TV viewers know about how television works. These days, it takes a serious and dedicated Web connoisseur to look for any experience beyond the Microsoft one. Of course, Mozilla came by way of Time Warner, the corporate owners of the Netscape brand, so if you crave a truly alternative Web experience, you may need to look elsewhere.

Regardless of who used to own what and which empire sued which conglomerate over which technology that neither invented, the fact remains: Your site will gain the respect of the true tech heads if it works with alternative browsers. Unfortunately, once again, the realities of the Web as it exists today make it so that general-purpose sites need not concern themselves with anything but IE. But check out www.mozilla.org/ anyway.




Web Design Garage
Web Design Garage
ISBN: 0131481991
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 202
Authors: Marc Campbell

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