History of the Internet and WWW

What is HTML?

Exercise: Hand-code your own page

Simple freeware WYSIWYG editors

Exercise: Make a page with AOLPress

Code references

Browser versions

FTP

Link syntax and file naming

HTML Basics

Jeff Williamson
Northern Virginia Community College
www.nvcc.edu/home/nvwillj/html-basics/
nvwillj@nvcc.edu

Browser versions

Users view your pages through the often highly variable lenses of browsers. Especially as your design and layout skills improve and you build more complex pages, you have to think about and see how your pages look in different browsers, different versions (including browser version and OS version, e.g. Navigator 3 on Win 3.1, Win 95 and Win 98), and on different platforms.

You would think this would not be a hard question - just "when did which makers release which versions, and what has each version supported?" People ask something like this all of the time in forums like Builder Buzz. And yes, you've figured it out - there is no easy answer. There are different platforms, different release dates, and many different versions (e.g. v.4.03 vs. 4.5) even just of Netscape and MSIE. Have a look at some browser statistics for the University of Illinois Engineering Workstations for an idea of what's involved in determining what's what.

Netscape provides a nice general general summary of tag support.for their browsers. This is about the most usable document on the topic that I've seen.

An even shorter summary might go like this:

Netscape Navigator 1.1 supported tables.
NN 2.0 supported Java, Javascript and font colors.
NN 3.0 supported font faces and table background colors.
NN 4 supports style sheets somewhat.

IE was not widely used until version 3.
IE 3 tag support is roughly similar to Netscape's, with some differences in implementation and some additional proprietary features.
IE 4 supports style sheets more than NN. However neither browser fully supports full CSS specs, and they support different portions.

AOL's browser history is much messier. First they wrote their own browser, then they tried something with NN, and now they use some modified version of IE. They have a page that explains as much of this as possible.

Some random observations

u The GVU WWW User Surveys suggest that the main thing that determines a user's browser is whatever was on his/her computer when he got it (Or in the case of ISPs, which browser their setup users). Comparatively few users upgrade their browsers.

u Most mass-market computers with Windows 95 or highter have some version of Internet Explorer installed. You can install Netscape Navigator without affecting IE. You can install multiple versions NN without affecting IE. However you can't install multiple versions of IE; the new version overwrites the old one.

u Somewhere in Builder Buzz, someone said that his company only dropped support for a browser after a second upgrade had some out, e.g. v.1 support was dropped after v.3 was released. That sounds like a nice rule of thumb to me.

u The future of web browsers is murky. Netscape is supposedly out of the business, yet they offered NN v4.5. IE will soon come out with v.5, but the GVU WWW surveys suggest that comparatively few people will download it. And then there's the AOL-Netscape thing.

Here's my best guess about what you can rely on for the short term:

1. Page design for v3 browsers should be supported for a good while to come
2. Consistent implementation of v4 browser capacities - notably style sheets - is a good ways off..

Unrelated: In searching for URL's for this page, one I found mentioned that Navigator has a built-in calculator - type mocha: Could be handy.