ABOUT THIS WEBSITE

A number of folks have asked us why we have a relatively Spartan Website, devoid of the usual heavy graphics deemed so de rigueur among B2B companies. Like, how would you be expected to know what we did, unless you were presented with a panoply of stock photos depicting silver-haired executives pensively mulling over their supply chains or young sales managers giving high-fives?

We have to admit that text encapsulated in graphics looks sharper to those with excellent eyesight. But not everyone has excellent eyesight. As an experiment to "see" what our website looks like to the vision-impaired, we're going to play some tricks with the browser. Though the instructions are for Internet Explorer, most other browsers have equivalent options. Simply select "Tools" from the menu bar, and then "Internet Options...". Using the "General" tab in the "Internet Options" dialog, choose the "Accessibility" button. You can check off all the options to "Ignore" colors, font sizes and font styles specified on Web pages. After you hit the "OK" button, you'll notice that Novannet's website is still entirely clear, readable and reasonably attractive. This also demonstrates how our website looks under old browsers - or text based browsers like Lynx - which don't support modern cascading style sheets.

Then select the "Advanced" tab on the "Internet Options" dialog. Under "Multimedia," simply uncheck the "Show pictures" box, and either hit "OK" or "Apply" to see the changes. Now you can "see" what basically a vision-impaired person sees (or hears). The Novannet Website is still entirely usable. Now point your web browser to one of the expensive, great-looking B2B company websites, like that of the legacy VAN, Global eXchange Services. You can also approximate the same experiment simply by using an online Lynx Viewer.

We think you now "see" our point: there's nothing quite so boring for the vision-impaired as to look at a bunch of empty boxes. This perfectly illustrates "graceful degradation." It's the way we build our website - with Accessibility in mind. And it corresponds to the way we build our software and run the 10-10-EDI^SM network.

The web pages comprising this site are XHTML™ 1.0 compliant. Since we're such hotshot XML experts, we figured we'd even do our web pages in XML!

XHTML is pure markup. It doesn't allow formatting stuff like colors and fonts to be specified, forcing clear separation of data and presentation. What we say - the valuable content describing Novannet's services - is in the HTML document. How the content is presented visually in your browser is controlled by a cascading style sheet.

This Website best viewed with... We're not bossy: it's not for us to tell you which browser to use when looking at this website. But we can tell you that any standards compatible browser will display it just peachy. The Windows versions of K-Meleon 0.7, Opera 7, Mozilla 1.4, Netscape 7.1, and Internet Explorer 6, along with the UNIX versions of Netscape 7 and Konqueror, all seem to work fine, displaying the pages as the Webmaster intended. Somewhat more problematic is the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) own open source Amaya 8.1 Editor/Browser. Its CSS conformance might be the weakest of the bunch - though it does an excellent job of validating strict XHTML 1.0. The most compliant browser in a technical sort of way seems to be Opera. But Internet Explorer has the most predictable and consistent behavior overall, and comes highly recommended.