The Previous Rant - Software that Doesn't Work Properly | The Next Rant - Chain Letters

The Rant

Web Browsers

(Note - this is quite an old document, and some of the information in it may have changed. Click here for a full explanation. Otherwise, read on!)

If you're viewing in colour, you may be "admiring" the title to this page, and wondering why it's so garish. It's to make a point about browsers, and HTML "compatibility" issues.

I wrote this page using AOLpress - which I find very quick and easy to use. I've no complaint against AOLpress, or either Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, for that matter. It's just irritating that strange things happen when you go from one to the other.

The problem is that different browsers interpret the significance of HTML tags in different ways. This is most frustrating when you've just spent several hours putting together a page (or pages), with the type styles carefully chosen to put just the right emphasis on certain words. You've carefully centred the headings and pictures. You've adjusted the size of the window to try to avoid any oddities that might occur when the reader does the same. Then, you look at it with another browser, and what's happened? It looks completely different, that's what! Quite often, the only way out is to look at the page in Notepad and tweak the HTML tags (reminds me of all those old "Airport" films when nobody could get the 'plane to budge, then George Kennedy would walk into the flight cabin, roll up his shirtsleeves, and get that plane moving by sheer brute force.)

The moral of all this?

Look at your page with as many browsers as possible;
If a Web page looks peculiar, it's not necessarily the author's fault. He / she / it may not have access to your browser. All right, so if your browser is Internet Explorer, that's not very likely - but stranger things have happened.
Try to get a feel for which effects do reproduce consistently. Italics and bold text seem pretty safe so far.
Of course, it's quite likely that both Microsoft and Netscape have updated their browsers by now - which means that the differences I've noted may well no longer apply, but anyway...
Dare I say it? Yes, I think I dare. Take a look at the section below. Do the words below have the appearance described on your browser? I've noted some differences in the way that these styles are treated by Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) and Netscape Navigator (NN):

Type Styles - Created using AOLpress

Bold Italic Fixed Pitch (Consistent in IE and NN!)

Underline (plain in NN)

~~Deleted (Strikeout~~ - plain in NN)

New (Greyed, and between vertical bars in AOLPress. Plain in IE3 [as far as I remember - I've now overwritten IE3 with IE4], underlined in IE4, plain in NN)

_Subscript ^Superscript - Plain in NN.

Citation (italics again)

Definition (Bold in AOLPress. Italics in IE, plain in NN.)

Emphasis (italics once more)

Keyboard (a fixed pitch font. Bold in IE but not in NN.)

Sample (fixed pitch again)

Strong (bold, and bright red in AOLPress - bold and black in IE and NN)

Variable (fixed pitch. Proportional in IE and NN. Plain in IE, Italic in NN. Oh, so that's what variable means!)

Colours - Created using AOLpress

Red Blue Yellow Green Fuchsia White Maroon Olive Navy Purple Lime Aqua Teal

Colours reproduced in IE but not NN.

Headings - Created using AOLpress

Biggest

Smallest

Consistent in IE and NN

Font Sizes (created using AOLpress)

A line of text that gets bigger from left to right.

Consistent in IE, all one size with NN

Font Sizes (created using Windows '95 Notepad)

A line of text that gets bigger from left to right.

Consistent in IE and NN

Update Number 1

Previous Update | Top Of Page | Next Update

This page is something of an historical document. For one thing, all the references I've made to Netscape Navigator apply to Version 2 - not just the previous generation, but the generation before that. Similarly, references to Internet Explorer apply to IE 3.0 - likewise, a standard that is long surpassed.

Nonetheless, this page represents my first reactions to writing web pages, testing them, and finding that their appearance varied according to what browser was used to look at them. Put simply, it annoyed me! But, then, a lot of things do that. Some time has passed since then, and I now have a better appreciation of the reasons for this, which are all to do with HTML standards, and the efforts of various software publishers to extend these standards, so that the user (you!) has an incentive to use their browser rather than that published by Someone Else™. So, it looks as if the sort of compatibility issues I've discussed on this page are here to stay.

Moral: When you write a web page, make sure you check what it looks like in as many browsers as possible. And even then, you could have a few surprises!

Click here to go back to the top.

Update Number 2 - 11 July 1998

Previous Update | Top Of Page | Next Update

I was right. There are still some surprises in store.

Having just got round to installing that copy of Internet Explorer 4 that came on the front of a magazine I bought a few months back, I had a look at my own web pages, and found a subtle difference in the way it handles paragraph alignment compared with other browsers. I've not yet explored (groan!) the full extent of the differences, but it seems that a horizontal rule in IE4 resets the paragraph alignment to the left. So, I'm now going round my pages reformatting them to make sure that the text lines up the way I want it to.

Isn't HTML fun!

Click here to go back to the top.

Update Number 3 - 12 December 1998

Previous Update | Top Of Page | Next Update

And there's more! Recently, I decided to try my hand at JavaScript. After having a look at what other people were doing, I had a brief rummage around Netscape's site and read their on-line documentation. I decided to try out one or two short scripts, and was a little disconcerted to find that some didn't work as I expected.

On-line documentation is all very well, but I still don't consider it a replacement for a book. A book is a lot quicker to leaf through, requires no power source (well, during the hours of daylight at least) and is much more portable than most desktop computer systems. So, I visited my "local" computer shop, looking for a reference book on JavaScript.

The book I found was Danny Goodman's JavaScript Bible (pub. IDG Books, ISBN 0-7645-3022-4). This is an extremely thick and extremely comprehensive guide to JavaScript, and as soon as I opened it I could see why I wasn't always getting the results I expected. As I've already whittered on at some length about HTML incompatibilities within browsers, it should come as no great surprise that there are also incompatibilities between different browsers in their implementation of JavaScript (or JScript, which Microsoft used as an alternative name for what is very nearly the same language).

If I'd thought that the HTML inconsistencies were bad, that's just peanuts compared with the J[ava]Script inconsistencies. Some browsers recognise particular elements of the language while others don't or, worse, do recognise them but interpret them in a totally different way. Which makes for some interesting fun and games trying to work out what can be done without producing a page that will be displayed incorrectly on at least one browser, or even cause the browser to crash. It's not just differences between IE and NN, but between versions (or even sub-versions) of the same browser.

Sometimes, there are even differences between the implementation on the Apple Macintosh and the PC of what is nominally the same sub-version of the same browser. Now, you might say that's not surprising, because Macs and PCs are very different beasties, but in the world of word processors, does one use Ctrl-N to restore normal text while another uses the same keystrokes to open a new document? Oh, all right, I admit you've got me there - but it's still annoying.

Anyway, I'm starting to put some JavaScript enhanced pages around the pages of actual content. I've also tested my pages to the best of my ability, but I'm very conscious of the fact that I don't have access to every browser ever written. In fact, having IE4 installed on my computer prevents me from using IE3, although I can still use IE2 to check what a really ancient browser sees :-). This in turn means that I can't be absolutely certain that what I do will work across the full range of browsers and platforms - so if something on this site doesn't work, I can only apologise.

Now that's all sorted out, click here to go back to the top.

The Previous Rant - Software that Doesn't Work Properly | The Next Rant - Chain Letters

Frames Off | Frames On | JavaScript