About the Hard Work of a Web designer

Originally it was never my intention to write a page about how to design web pages but instead design my own pages so that they look nice with whatever browser You decide to use...
Well so far about my intentions but then came the programmers from companies like Netscape, Micro$oft and Opera_Software and decided that rules and standards were a nice thing to play with!

   Of course and understandingly in the beginning there were only the small capabilities of the very early versions of HTML and because communication between the two giants Netscape and Microsoft was impossible - so both invented their own extensions to this standard. As a consequence you could design web pages that really looked nice in either one of the browsers but rather ugly in the other. In the worst case the other browser would even refuse to show the page or decide to rather crash your system than displaying such a page.
   Now - some years later - there are more or less three browsers in common use: Netscape Communicator, Microsoft's InternetExplorer and a relative newcomer Opera.
   While the first two slowly approach the magic border of 20 MB in download size with a patched or new version every few months (do they have a deal with your internet provider???) the third one still fits on a single 3 1/2 inch disk!
   The newest versions of these browsers (in the moment these are v4.60 for Netscape, v4.x for the IExplorer and v3.60 for Opera) are all of a newer date than the latest HTML standard HTML 4.0 from february, 18th 1998, but don't you think that only one of these browsers implements the full standard! And even worse: There are a lot of different bugs in the different implementations!!!
   So, if your intention is to publish web pages that look as they should in at least two of these browsers you have two choices:

simply use the basic set of HTML 1.0 which seems to be understood by most browsers today
test your creation with as many different browsers you can install on as many different operating systems as possible

If you don't calculate the time needed - and you don't do that if it concerns your private homepage - you still encounter problems. Even if you always have the latest version of your favorite web browser on your system there might be all different versions of the same browser still be around in the wide world of the web. OK - you think - let's test it even with different versions of the same browser... Good idea, but even if you have the harddisk space, there is the problem that it for example is impossible to have more than one version of Billy's product on the same machine... And you will only end up with an endless hatred against all the browser programmers out there and writing a page like this...

You are still there? Thank you very much and congratulations!!!
Here comes the index over the following pages that deal with inconsistencies, incompatibilities and bugs in so-called "modern" web browsers.


browsers.html	Some very nasty behaviours I discovered using different browsers...
browsertest.html	Let this little page check the compatibility of your browser's javascript functions...
identify.html	So the browsers behave differently - but how do you know which browser is just reading your page?
incompatibilities.html	CSS style sheets give a nice touch to your web pages - if only the browsers would know what to do with them...

So much for this page! If you are missing something OR have some own experiences you would like to share, just send me a mail!