Vielleicht gibt es diese Seite ja auch auf DeutschTools of trade
Many people don't know that there are standards describing the way websites (or emails) should be designed. These standards, as an example, define a set of commands one might use to create an html page. The most important thing about them is that through them programmers of software like web-browsers or email-clients know precisely what the data their programs will have to deal with will look like. Take the signature of an email: It must be seperated from the body by a line that contains exactly two dashes and one blank and nothing else. Hence, when an email client parses a mail and comes to a line like "-- ", it knows that the following is a signature and it can display this part of the message in a different color or maybe not at all, depending on the user's preferences.
Of course there will be a problem if someone writes an email program that does not seperate the signature from the body in the right way. In this case, mail readers won't be able any more to display messages the way the user wants them to. Clearly this should not happen, espacially not since the email standard is very well (and openly) documented.
In principle, everything should be fine, there should not be any compatibility problems, neither with email programs nor with web browsers, as all programmers have access to the documents describing the date they'll have to deal with. If only there were no such companies as microsoft. They seem to believe that supporting open standards would endanger their dominating position on the software market and therefore outlook doesn't format emails in the right way and IE doesn't display correct html correctly.
To make things even worse for HTML coders, IE is not the only browser that is not standars compliant, older versions of netscape for instance have their problems with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, some kind of style files one can use to create a common outfit for multiple html pages) as well. Incompatibilities are one reasons why I refuse to use javascript for my web-pages.
It is obviously hardly possible to write html code that produces comparably good output with all browsers and I therefore decided to strictly keep to the html standard as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium.
The browser that produces the best results of my homepage is Mozilla, the open source web browser that has been developed from the sources of netscape 4.something. Meanwhile being very stable, fast and absolutely standars compliant as well as easy to install on windows (and of course part of any reasonably up-to-date linux distribution), mozilla is nothing to be afraid of. You should definitely give it a try, whatever platform you're using.
Users of Linux/Unix-Systems might want to use Galeon instead of mozilla. Being a just a browser and not email-client, newsreader, html composer and and and ..., galeon is quite a bit faster than mozilla, while still using gecko, mozilla's fantastic rendering engine. Hence any page that displays correctly in mozilla will look identically in galeon (pages mozilla has problems with will of course not look better in galeon). Galeon does especially offer a lot of nice features like mouse-gestures or tabbed browsing (which, as has to be said here, have first appeared in opera).
I should note here that Mozilla and Galeon are the only browsers to display my navigation boxes correctly, where the images change depending on whether the mouse pointer is moving across the images or not. Since all other browsers (apart from w3m) did not display anything at all, I decided to give them different pages than the ones gecko-based browsers see. Because you'll certainly want to know what you're missing, I've put these two screenshots here that show the output mozilla generates from the German version of this page:
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I must admit that I don't really like opera. Compared to other browsers I feel that it is not really intuitive to use. It is noticeably faster than mozilla and galeon, but sadly has some problems with parts of my webpages, worst of all the navboxes, but it does also not know what to do with ordered lists that have greek letters as indices. Apart from that, opera is doing quite well.
Which holds for konqueror as well. Konqueror doesn't like my greek letters and it somehow displays pngs in a peculiar way, but other than that it does not have any serious problems, if you don't mind having to reload most pages because konqueror doesn't immediatly understand I'm using tables for layout reasons. Personally I think that konqueror's output is not really beautiful, but that's just my taste.
As far as I know, Internet Explorer does not like transparent pngs, which is sad but I'm not going to use more gifs on my pages than I'm using at the moment, so IE'll have to learn a bit. I'm sorry about the greek letters here as well about the navboxes which don't behave as I would like them to, which means they have a fixed position and should not scroll with the other parts of the window in the first place.
So very obviously what I think you should be doing if you want to see my homepage the way I intended people to see it, is the following:
Use Mozilla!
Back to technical stuffCreated Monday, 08/07/2002
