Esotropiart

Today I finished a new page for my redesign of the C2F site. After testing the site in a large number of browsers, I discovered that pretty much every browser displays the pages with enough integrity to support most functionality. I tested in Firefox version 1.0.5 and 1.5; Internet Explorer versions 4, 5, 5.5 and 6; Opera 9; and Netscape versions 4.79, 7.1 and 8.1. I also used an online rendering service that takes a screenshot of any url in Safari on a Macintosh. The site was amazingly viewable in all these browsers except Netscape 4.7, the worst browser ever made!

I recently had the privilege of seeing the site statistics for this site I have been working on, namely the browser usage stats. As would be expected, the stats mirror the trends all over the net: Internet Exploder was in first and Firefox was in second, while Opera, Netscape, Safari and others also had a presence. Interestingly enough there were some people still visiting with Netscape 4.x. The numbers were small, but I decided to create a simple script that would accommodate this archaic browser. My new layout, though very carefully designed and surprisingly backwards compatible, totally explodes in Netscape 4.7. There are literally random color blocks and pieces of text strewn about, and the links aren't clickable for some reason - totally unusable (even netscape.com explodes in this same fashion in Netscape 4.7!). Thanks to a simple javascript snippet I wrote, the home page redirects to a stripped down HTML4 (old) browser update page (instead of the favorable XHTML, and virtually no CSS) where these users are encouraged to update their browsers. This redirection only occurs if someone is using specifically Netscape, versions below 5. I also created a fully styled version of the browser update page that includes an explanation why it is good to update as well as links to all the major browsers' most current download pages. I am somewhat proud of this page, and it was accepted by my superiors with essentially no changes!

This project was quite fun, and a valuable learning experience. Generally I code according to the most current widely accepted W3C standards (currently XHTML and CSS 2), adding only extra code that lends to rendering properly in multiple browsers (if only everyone was as good as Firefox, currently the best browser available!). Creating a page that displays with any appeal in Netscape 4.7 and some older browsers is not an easy task - not because the code is hard to write, but it's hard to make oneself design ancient, inefficient and badly-structured pages when better techniques are fully grasped, and the contrast is stark! Since CSS isn't even supported much at all, simple and ancient HTML4 tags and attributes (including the nasty <font> tag!) must be used. This sort of coding brought back memories to when I first started coding web pages, before I set out to master web standards. I'm so glad efforts are being made to standardize and structure the web. I just wish it would come faster! If only the various browser makers would comply instead of complicate!

I also found online documentation that allows multiple versions of browsers to be installed simultaneously. Microsoft doesn't normally allow multiple versions of IE to be installed, so I had to find a workaround. Netscape and some others allow multiple versions with little trouble and provide archived downloads directly from their sites. I have a host of browsers installed at work now, an appropriate move, since my responsibilities are almost exclusively web design.