Airlie Beach Bum is written to strictly conform to World Wide Web Consortium recommendations on how to write web pages. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is an active director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). I figure W3C should know what they are talking about.

Not really. Best viewed by downloading Safari or Opera or (not perfect) Firefox, or any standards compliant browser. Some features I tried (like multiple column layouts) rely upon experimental browser support in Safari and Firefox. However multi column layouts do not agree with the dimensions of an iPhone display, so for the moment I have commented out that CSS.

I use web standards. All pages are written in the simplest, most semantically reasonable HTML I can manage, given the limitations of semantic support in HTML. Tables are not used, except where tabular data is present. General elements like divs and spans are used sparingly. Unlike many web sites, all pages are valid HTML 4.01 Strict, and have been validated by W3C.

All the major browser owners (Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, and Opera) are members of the W3C. All have agreed their browsers should comply with W3C recommendations. I take the browser designers at their word, that correctly written pages will render correctly.

Airlie Beach Bum performs worst in Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer 7 gets the text correct. It misses some fancy tricks, in the logo for example. Internet Explorer 5.5 is basically unusable. Internet Explorer 6 is not as bad as IE5.5, which isn't exactly a big endorsement.

Why don't I provide more support for Internet Explorer? Because I am sick and tired of writing complicated kluges and special tricks to fix problems in Microsoft's browsers. This page will render correctly in any Standards mode browser. Microsoft, the errors in rendering are your problem, not mine. If I were really intent on not supporting Internet Explorer, I would write my pages in XHTML, and serve it correctly as XHTML. We all know what happens in Internet Explorer then!

The Internet Explorer architecture is ancient, with support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) dating back to IE3 (the first browser to use CSS), when Microsoft started embracing CSS in their browser battles against the then dominant Netscape browser. The Trident rendering engine dates from IE4. Due to the importance Microsoft place on maintaining compatibility with the vast number of badly written web sites out there, they have problems when updating. Microsoft are continuing to improve standards support in Internet Explorer. I look forward to the day when a future version of Internet Explorer renders this web site the way I wrote it.

Special note to web site designers and developers. If you don't know how to write a standard web site, stop claiming that you do. Write your broken page in HTML Transitional, not HTML Strict. Then browsers would use Quirks (broken) mode, not Standards mode.

Just for all you backpackers and tourists, the Airlie Beach Bum web site is also optimised to be easy to read on an iPhone or an iPod Touch display. It uses a fluid design, with no fixed width or fixed size text, no fancy fonts, and no giant graphics without warnings. The html includes the viewpoint meta, which allows Webkit to select its own width and height, even for iPhone models that do not yet exist. Enjoy, but let me know if something fails to work.

Yes, I know the logo at the bottom of the page falls off the right hand side of the display. The alternatives to fix that on a small display all seem worse to me, so it is working as designed. Most alternatives involve horizontal scroll bars, or forcing text sizes. These are worse choices, and don't work on all mobile devices.