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Q. How many platforms will it need to run on?
A. Aim to support everything but only ship on the ones that work.
This depends on your marketing strategy. However, you should - unless your product has browser-specific content - design everything so that it could be made available on any browser or CD ROM for any platform. This means for instance not imposing a particularly ‘Windows-ish’ or Macintosh like GUI style. I have produced projects that run on Macintosh, UNIX, VMS and PC systems. So far I have not done one that would run on all of them but its certainly theoretically possible. The problem here is not so much the content but more to do with finding a player engine that will work on all the different platforms. In the end, I have had to solve that by writing my own player. I have just completed the PC version for one of my clients. At the outset, I developed the concept and idea so that it could easily be rebuilt on a different platform altogether. Structurally, the main event processing is different on windows compared with other platforms but that is a minimal part of the application. Its also important to bear in mind the difference in performance between an entry level machine and a power workstation class machine. They are different enough sometimes to qualify being considered almost a separate platform.
Check out the whole list of Cliff's pithy tips for Web developers.
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