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Webmaster Outpost
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by Webmaster Outpost Staff
Your Web browser is a translation device. It takes a document written in the HTML language and translates it into a formatted Web page. The result of this translation is a little like giving two human translators a sentence written in French and asking them to translate it into English. Both will get the meaning across, but may not use the same words to do so.
Internet visionary Marc Andreessen was recently asked the question, "What kind of a role do you think the browser plays these days?" Here's his response:
"Good news, bad news. The bad news is the browser is kind of done. Essentially, nothing new has happened since it got adopted in the mainstream over the past four years. Microsoft releases a new version of Internet Explorer, and it's like, what exactly are the new features? There's probably three or four new features in there, but who cares? So that's the bad news."
"The good news is, it's everywhere now. The concept is everywhere, the implementations are everywhere, everybody uses it, everybody understands the metaphor and the shift in the architecture of computing around the browser is very serious. Ten years ago, client-server (computing) meant having to use a centralized database, and it meant that all the applications were distributed on fat clients, which meant they couldn't change very often. It meant applications were hard to use and it meant that they only could be really used by a limited number of people -- typically, your own employees. And so companies had no way of building applications that extended out to their customers and partners. The shift in the computing architecture when it went to a Web architecture was very serious, because now you've got a centralized distribution mechanism for applications. Put an application up on a central server or set of servers and anybody with a browser can access it, and it's easy to use. That's really a permanent swing in the industry."
Internet Explorer 6 is a set of core technologies in Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional, and is available to users of Microsoft Windows® 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me), Microsoft Windows NT® Workstation 4.0, and Windows 2000 Professional operating systems. Internet Explorer 6 includes many new and enhanced features that can simplify the daily tasks that you perform, while helping you to maintain the privacy of your personal information on the Web.
Netscape 7.0 is the latest Netscape browser suite designed to let you get the most from your time online. Netscape 7.0 is optimized for what you do most often on the web -- browsing, searching, listening to music, and communicating with friends and family. It offers fast and efficient Internet browsing and email, the #1 instant messaging service, and the all new Radio@Netscape Plus - available in just one click.
Opera is a high-quality Web browser available on a wide range of platforms. The Opera browser is a fast, full-featured, award-winning browser available for operating systems, including Windows, Linux and Mac OS. On the desktop, Opera is available on a wide array of operating systems, and this number is growing. Thanks to the platform-independence of the core code, Opera can easily be ported onto other platforms while maintaining the small size, speed, security and flexibility that has received international acclaim from end-users and industry press.
A good rule of thumb is to design your pages to work for the last two versions of the major browsers. While a handful of people use browsers older than that, their numbers aren't large enough to justify the sacrifice required to support them.
Also, many less experienced Webmasters design their pages without tables, or dimension their tables to fit 100% of the screen width. If you've built your Web page this way on a computer with an 800-pixel screen, you may be surprised how your page is stretched to fit a larger screen. Text and graphics that were adjacent on your smaller screen may not be so on a large screen. To avoid this, wrap the content of your page inside a single, large, one-cell table. Set the width of this table to be about 560-pixels, if you're designing for a 600 pixels layout, or 750-pixels if you're designing for an 800 pixel layout.