Web Standards Compliance and Browser Compatibility Notices

Every Web page in the thornton2.com domain complies (to the best of the author's ability) with published W3C standards. These pages look best in a standards-compliant browser, but they are easy to use with any Web browser. Instant validation buttons can be found at the bottom of most pages. These pages are regularly tested in a variety of Web browsers. This site looks best in any browser without incorrect Web standards interpretation.

This site complies with the following W3C Recommendations:

• Hyper-Text Markup Language 4.01 (HTML )
• Extensible Hyper-Text Markup Language 1.0 (XHTML ),
• Extensible Markup Language 1.0 (XML ),
• Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 (CSS ), and
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Level A (WCAG ).

This site complies partially with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Levels AA ("Double-A ") and AAA ("Triple-A "), above and beyond what is required for Level A compliance.

The main site design is known to be poorly rendered in Microsoft Internet Explorer (or IE for short), including Version 7 of Microsoft's browser. Its poor display in IE is because the browser has been found by impartial research to either mis-interpret or outright violate several key Web standards, at least one of which Microsoft themselves played a major role in developing. For this reason, and to preserve minimum content accessibility in IE, this site's author created a basic style sheet and server-side browser detection program specifically for IE, steps that would be unnecessary if IE ignored the portions of the Web standards it doesn't properly understand.

If you have a Web site of your own, then please feel free to copy and use the table below on your own Web site and help promote the adoption and proper handling of Web standards by Web browser makers.

This site does not host or knowingly use any GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) files. The format is both obsolete and covered by US Patent #4,588,302: The LZW compression algorithm, owned by Unisys Corp. Unisys has repeatedly extended both the price and scope of this patent, while clouding a site owner's right to merely host a GIF file without a patent license. (IBM also has a patent covering the same "invention," which didn't expire until Friday, August 11, 2006.) This site will not take the legal risk of perhaps unknowingly hosting infringing content and will instead use patent-free, better supported, and better quality file formats. The impact of multiple patents covering the same "invention" is a point not lost on this site's developer.

It's worth noting that, although the patent and its known variants expired on Friday, August 11, 2006; Unisys, IBM, or other parties may be seeking an extension to these patents. If approved, such approval is retroactive yet can't be known until months (or even years) after it's granted. Such is the state of the patent system currently employed by the USPTO.

If your browser does not support the JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group), PNG (Portable Network Graphic), or MNG (Multiple-image Network Graphic) file formats, you need not worry: a graphics-enabled browser is recommended but not required. All images intended as more than mere decoration are downloadable for viewing in a dedicated image viewer application.