Well, I may not be an expert at all this yet, but in order to preserve my own experience with this inter-browser tweaking stuff I shall do my best to present my notes here. First, let me say that I went to great lengths to get my web site looking as I wanted it to on Netscape, while trying to follow various recommendations in the literature on the web. It was quite a shock to see the results of my work via AOL's brand new browser. It doesn't seem to support tables or font sizes, and I had lots of that stuff in my markup. So here's the notes, until I get to revise them:
- OK, let's start with lists. My Netscape code was, for one reason or another, rather sloppy in this regard, but since tables are not supported at AOL, lists need to have end tags! I place them between the
</td> and <td> tags,or the </tr> and <tr> tags, since Netscape inserts an implied <p> at the end of a properly terminated list. Now Netscape ignores the </ul> tag just as AOL ignores all the table markup. I don't like extra space inside the bottom of a table, and prefer to get as much on my monitor as I can wihout needing to scroll the page.
- Since table formatting is ignored, I've had to figure out where to put in lots of
<br> markers in such a way that Netscape will ignore them. I usually put them just before the </table> tag or in the same place as the </ul> tag (see above).
- Sometimes all the text in a document, at least viewed locally, is in monospaced type. The reason is that, seemingly at random, the AOL browser inserts a
<PRE> tag at the beginning of a document. Check the "View Source..." menu option if you experience this. I've inserted a few leading </pre> tags to correct this glitch, and some have probably remained in the text.
- Sometimes a little line appears trailing a graphic. I don't know if it happens in a nonMac environment, but the damn thing is a RETURN character, stuck in to make the text at my workstation more readable. They should be ignored by the browser, but they're not. I've now deleted all of them, running the text together in a clump. As with the previous note, I have no idea if this is a local-viewing-only problem.
- While my transparent-background GIFs seem to work fine *locally*, they don't coming back over the wire. I reworked my buttons to match the background color of the page, and then made *that* the transparent color. Note: Transparency in a remotely viewed gif is often restored by reloading the page.
- Addendum: It's a while since I wrote the above lines, and I have since trashed many of my list items and inserted a series of bullets in graphcs form. Oh, well. I get about twice as much info in the window of outmoded browsers this way.
I'm sure there are a few caveats I've neglected to get in here, like the precise nesting order of some of these things, but check out my source code and please be kind. Rule Number One for "Good HTML" is to attempt to present a document that is passably attractive in all browsers. I really liked the way my pages looked in Netscape before I made these changes, but considering that AOL is possibly the second most popular platform today, I suppose I can live with a few imperfections. |
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