Web Design, In General Question - What's your opinion and thoughts???

First, Curtis, I just looked at your site in both IE5 and Netscape 4.61. Looked the same in both. So, in short, you often don't need to make a special effort to design for both browsers.

Whether 3.x users are a minority all depends on your target audience. Slightly knowledgeable computer users, or just people who buy the best things, will not have 3.x browsers. However, inexperienced computer users will, 80% of the time, always use the browser that came with their computer. IE3 was bundled with most copies of Windows 95.

Also, computers at businesses, schools & universities, etc. often still run very old browser versions. This is either because upgrading huge numbers of computers and re-training users to use the new browser interfaces is very expensive, or because some of their computers are too slow to run recent browsers properly.

Unless you're doing complicated DHTML stuff, you will not need to make different pages for difference browsers. Every semi-big commercial site out their works with IE and Netscape. Very, very few have separate pages depending on your browser. There are problems with compatibility with older versions of browsers, but you can generally discount anything older than 3.x and you should be able to make your page usable, though not quite as pretty, with the 3.x browsers.

Ian: Microsoft is really no more guilty of perverting HTML than Netscape. IE5 is way, way more standards-compliant than the most recent Netscape. It still falls short, of course, but it's the best there is. It is true that the Mozilla Seamonkey engine (the very weird name for what will become the next version of Netscape) is very good at standards support, but it is also not yet a usable browser. As to IE introducing a language that other browsers do not accept, this is true - VBScript and ActiveX are examples, though their dynamic HTML model was based on standards - but Netscape did the same - the Netscape dynamic HTML model and JavaScript (now a standard, but not when Netscape made it). As to the HTML editors, well I hate both NS Composer and FrontPage FrontPage does generate messy HTML, much more so than Netscape, but Netscape Composer is also very basic and will let you do very little.

Hey Curtis,
From my own experience (probably less than yours) I've found that tables (and special effects) are what get screwed up the most between browsers. Also, a lot of it has to do with the software if your using a WYSIWYG editor. ie. netscape composer composes poorly for IE, and vise versa.
sorry, I can't be of more help

take care,
Carolyn

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Asymmetric Designs, unique designs for contemporary minds
http://asymmetric.hypermart.net/sitedesign.html

Hi Curtis,

What is 4.6 doing to your site? Was going to d/l it in the next few days myself. Maybe I should do it now.

I usually design for NS and IE takes care of itself (most of the time). Don't usually worry too much about version 3 users. They are getting to be such a minority. Although, they are the main reason that I don't use css much.

Guess the only sure way is to build multiple web sites and have a java script detect which browser and redirect to the right site. yech!! Have a hard enough time creating one web site, let alone 5 or 6.

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Dan
http://cds-computers.com

Thats definantly correct Carolyn, thats the problem. Microsoft is really stupid if they want to create a language that other browsers can't recognize (i don't think they do anything right ) Anyway, I don't waste time anymore trying to get the page to look right in both browsers.

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FireBurn Web Publishing - fireburn.com
[red]Low cost web design, graphic design, and more![/red]

Thanks for all your opinions and thoughts. I want my sites to be viewable by almost all browsers, so I'm not loosing business. On my site, do you think it still would look as good if I took the left part of the page that is purple and left that whole left side purple, where the buttons are and then change the rest from where the white starts and make all of that white, instead of having purple at the top and bottom in that area???? Here is the url: http://www.imsnewsletter.com/

Thanks for your help!

Curtis

Whether you should design for version 3 browsers depends on your site demographics really. If your site caters for say, web developers skip version 3 browsers. If however you have a site about shopping for example you should think about v3 as your audience is likely to not be up to date.
JP

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