A Complete Guide to Web Design

4 Chapter 1 – Designing for a Variety of Browsers

Browsers

Web Design in a Nutshell, eMatter Edition

The browser landscape has been dominated by these two contenders as they

battle it out for market dominance. Their struggle to be cooler than the next guy

has resulted in a collection of proprietary HTML tags as well as incompatible

implementations of new technologies (most notoriously Dynamic HTML, but also

JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets). On the positive side, the competition

between Netscape and Microsoft has also led to the rapid advancement of the

medium as a whole.

Netscape publishes information for developers athttp://developer.netscape.com /.

Of particular interest are the documentation pages, including listings of Netscape’s

HTML tag support athttp://developer.netscape.com/docs/manuals/.

Microsoft provides a rich resource of developer information at their SiteBuilder

Network site, http://www.microsoft.com/sitebuilder/,and the SiteBuilder Work-

shop,http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/.

Other Browsers

Most web authors base their designs on the functionality of Navigator and Internet

Explorer, since they claim the lion’s share of the market; however, there are a

number of other browsers you may choose to take into consideration.

Internet Explorer 4.0 on the Macintosh

Not all IE4.0 browsers are created equal! The Macintosh version of IE4.0 lacks

significant functionality found in its Windows sibling, so including 4.0-specific

features in your site may still leave some users out. As a general guideline, treat

Mac IE4.0 like Netscape 3.0.

Some documented shortcomings include:

• No embedded font support


• No support for CSS filters and transitions (visual effects such as “drop
  shadow” that can be applied to text elements)


• No multimedia controls (animation and transition effects ordinarily created by
  multimedia authoring software)


• Problematic DHTML implementation: despite the fact that Microsoft claims
  DHTML is supported on all platforms, it’s extremely unreliable on the Mac
  Microsoft’s official statement on Cross-Platform Functionality can be found athttp://
  http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/essentials/versions/xplatform.htm.

America Online browsers

America Online subscribers use one of seven possible browsers (depending on

their platform and version of the AOL software), some of them lacking all but the

most minimal HTML support.

The current version of America Online for the PC, 3.0 as of this writing, uses an

adaptation of the Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 browser; however, you can’t

always count on it to perform the same as the standard MSIE 3.0 release. (Func-

tionality is particularly limited for Mac users.) Many web designers have been