Upgrade to a better Web experience.WEB BUILDERS: Tired of hacks and versioning? Write valid markup and code, optimizing it to degrade reasonably on older, non–compliant browsers. If you must, send non–compliant browsers to this page, or (better still) to your own Browser Upgrades page, crafted to the needs of your particular audience. If your site relies on the W3C DOM or CSS layouts, an upgrade page could be of great service to your readers. Our Tips Page can assist you in planning the strategy that best suits your site. Valid HTML 4.01. No big deal. |
BROWSER UPGRADES
How did I get here?The folks who built the site you were trying to visit (" >) have directed you to this page because your browser does not support accepted web standards. (Or you may have simply followed a link to this page.) What “web standards?”The ones created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) — the people who invented the web itself. The W3C created these standards so the web would work better for everyone. New browsers, mainly, support these W3C standards; old browsers, mainly, don’t. What can I do?You might consider upgrading to any of the following browsers. Doing so will allow you to use and view websites as their creators intended. IE6 for Windows delivers fine support for HTML 4, CSS-1, and other important W3C standards. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means; the people who build your websites know. The browser is available free of charge. IE5 Macintosh Edition, released in March 2000, provides superb support for key web standards (CSS, HTML, XHTML, PNG, ECMA-262, DOM1HTML) and an elegant user experience. IE5.1, released December 2001, improves on its predecessor. The browser is available free of charge. Netscape 6.2 complies with important Web standards, including full support for XML and the DOM. These technologies can help web builders create powerful sites that work well. The browser is available free of charge. Netscape 6.2 fixes bugs in earlier releases, and adds support for Mac OSX. It is based on the standards–compliant Gecko engine and open–source Mozilla, which supports AIX, Linux, Win32, Mac OS, OpenVMS, HPUX, and FreeBSD, and which may be the most compliant of all current browsers. Opera 6 for Windows, released 13 November 2001, supports many key web standards and a variety of computing platforms. Its lead designer was the chief author of the CSS-1 standard. The browser, which works well even on older PCs with limited power, is available free of charge. (A pay version is also available.) Opera supports Windows, Linux (beta, but works very well), Mac OS (beta, but works very well), and will soon support the OS/2, EPOC, and BeOS platforms. Konqueror is a full–featured, modern graphical browser for Unix/Linux, with excellent support for web standards including HTML 4, CSS-1, ECMAScript, and the DOM Level 1, and partial support for XML and CSS-2. The current version is not at the same level of compliance, however, as Mozilla, IE, and Opera, and some sites may display incorrectly in Konqueror as a result. The IBM Web Browser is based on Netscape's open source Mozilla project (see above), and offers excellent standards support for folks using IBM's OS2/Warp and Workspace On–Demand. NOTE: OmniWeb, a promising new brower for Mac OS X, has been excluded from this list because its standards compliance is not optimal at this time. Omniweb has been much praised for its elegant interface and superb antialiasing of text, and its support for Unicode and international character sets is unparalleled (only Mozilla comes close). Unfortunately, Omniweb’s support for important web standards like CSS1 and the DOM is so poor as to make it unusable. See Omniweb & Standards for a review of Omniweb’s performance in CSS and DOM tests, using version 4.1b1 (released in late December 2001), or read Cocoa Browser Missing Important Features for an assessment of the previous release. Omniweb is an innovative browser with great promise, but, because of its botched handling of essential web standards, we cannot recommend it at this time. |
||
 |
|||