4 CSS Web Design For Dummies
That’s simply no longer true. The migration is over; Netscape is merely a
ghost wandering the halls of the computer history museums.Most CSS books waste lots of space on compatibility issues. I’ve decided to
greatly reduce coverage of that topic for precisely the same reason that
today’s newspapers infrequently devote space to the Gulf War of 1991. That
war’s over. Same with Netscape and the other, minor browsers like Opera
that have a small user base. History and popular opinion has elected Internet
Explorer (IE) as the standard — who are we to argue? One exception is Mozilla
Firefox, which is coming out of left field and could eventually challenge
Internet Explorer’s dominance in the browser arena.Firefox is an “open source” — in other words, “no charge” — piece of software.
Of course, Internet Explorer is also sometimes described as free. True, it
comes “free” with Windows, but as we all know, that’s not precisely the same
as no charge. You do buy Windows, and its browser is a feature of Windows
that you get bundled into the operating system.Another meaning of open sourceis that the code, the programming underly-
ing the Firefox browser, is available to anyone. Lots of good programmers are
writing interesting plug-ins and modifications that you can add to Firefox to
give it new features.Firefox is fast, sleek, and overall pretty stable. In fact, it’s not under constant
attack by hackers, as is IE. There are two reasons for this: not too many
people are using Firefox (yet), so the payoff of using it to spread viruses is
rather poor. Second, virus authors are frequently in sympathy with the ideals
of the open source software community, and, shall we say, less inclined to
appreciate Microsoft.So, watch out, IE. Firefox, or something similar, could eventually gain market
share and, possibly, eventually become the browser standard. But for now,
more than 95 percent of browser users are looking at your Web page through
IE, so you can generally ignore the problems that arise when you try to make
your CSS code work with all possible browsers and all possible versions of
those browsers. IE is likely to continue to dominate for at least the next few
years.Just relax and assume that your Web page visitors are either using IE, or are
accustomed to the penalties for sticking with a fringe browser. But if you
must face the compatibility issue, take a look at Chapter 17.Who Should Read This Book .........................................................................
This book is designed to satisfy a broad audience, including both Web pro-
grammers and designers. The book shows how to exploit CSS by developing
solutions to common Internet coding and Web-page design problems.03_584251 intro.qxd 2/10/05 11:14 PM Page 4