You've just created your beautiful web page complete with graphics, sounds and all the bells and whistles you can think of. You open up your Internet Explorer version 6.0 and everything looks absolutely perfect. You then put your page up on the Internet for all the world to see and the next day you get the following email.

"Dear sir, I just went to your site to buy some multimedia products and much to my shock and horror, it was totally blank. Is your site down?"

You scratch your head wondering what the problem could be. You write to the person, trying to get as much information as you can and eventually discover they are using Netscape version 5.0. You don't have the browser on your computer so you go and download it just to see if you end up seeing what the puzzled visitor saw. Sure enough, you go to YOUR web page, the one that displayed so perfectly on I.E. 6.0 and when you open it up in Netscape 5.0 you see absolutely...nothing.

Welcome to the battle of the browsers.

Unfortunately as the years progressed, and with it the enhancements to HTML itself, the differences in the way each browser handled these enhancements became as wide a chasm as the Grand Canyon itself. And if you think Netscape and I.E. are ever going to get together and play nice, you'd better think again. It is NOT going to happen.

So how do you deal with this problem? How do you design a web page that will display correctly on I.E., Netscape and every other browser in existence? The honest answer is, you can't, but since most people use I.E. 6.0, Netscape and Mozilla you can at least program your web pages to try to accommodate the majority of the visitors you will receive.

The main problem you will find between I.E. and Netscape is layers and how they are displayed. In plain English, layers are areas of your web page that you can set up the exact pixel position where you want something to appear. This gives you the most control over how the layout of your page will look, even more so than using the [table] tag. The problem is, Netscape has created its own way of handling layers with the [layer] tag. The reason this is a problem is because the [layer] tag is not compatible with I.E. So in order to make your web pages generic between the two browsers use the [div] tag instead. This tag will work in both I.E. and Netscape and for the most part your pages should look similar in both browsers though there may still be some minor differences.

There are other differences between the way browsers handle tables, graphics and other items. We will try to cover some more of those differences in future articles. But with the ever constant change in HTML and how browsers handle the code, your best bet is to go to http://www.w3.org/. Here you will find the latest reports on HTML, CSS and just about everything involved with making a web page. This way you'll be assured of always being right up to the minute on the latest advances and problems.

Michael Russell
Your Independent guide to HTML

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