I hope you feel these pages are starting to fulfill their purpose. The subject is treated seriously and I haven’t attempted to make this a ‘fun’ site. Partly by design, partly for lack of suitable material and the expertise to produce this, there are few images to slow down transmission or processing and I don’t anticipate download time as being a problem.

The pages have been developed on a Windows 95 PC having a 17in. monitor at a screen resolution of 1152 X 864 and with MS Explorer [v. 5.5] as the test bed; whilst at the same time learning the basics of HTML. As an amateur I cannot test on other platforms or operating systems but have tried to ensure compatibility with Netscape Navigator [v. 6.0]. Having no preconceptions; I am not enamoured of this browser.

Page width is set at a 620 pixels to produce a consistent appearance across different monitor sizes and ensure that printed output is similar to what is seen on the screen. Where, as so often, pages are stretched out across large screens the resulting long line lengths make reading difficult.

Further to these remarks, I have recently become aware that smaller typefaces may not be easy to read by those using the AppleMac platform or who have less than perfect vision. Because of the way the pages are constructed they do not respond to the View > Typesize > function [Ctrl +/- in Netscape] which should enable viewers to choose a proportionate enlargement of type size. Steps are in hand to rectify this but, since this entails major rebuilding, there will be an inevitable time lapse before the whole site is so enabled. In the meantime, my apologies to those affected.

To reduce online time, load successive articles or pages which appear of interest into the browser without reading fully. Once offline, these pages can be recalled from the browser cache (History list) and read at leisure or printed out as hardcopy.

Printing issues

MS Explorer, now at version 5.5, is a mature and well developed program that causes few problems. If you wish the printed pages to appear just as they do onscreen, configure as follows:

from the Tools menu select Internet Options and then Advanced; scroll down to Printing (about halfway); make sure there’s a tickmark in the checkbox ‘Print background colours and images’; and finally click OK.

Netscape Navigator (Communicator) undergoes frequent revision (4.7 is the latest I’ve got my hands on) and yet, as I’ve recently discovered, is still far from mature. Although it will display pages such as mine which use Stylesheets, it is incapable of correctly printing them. On my setup each line is printed on a separate page!! This, from a piece of supposedly Worldclass software.

The only solution, apart from switching to Explorer, is to disable stylesheets which will spoil my carefully crafted (!) pages but enable you to print:

from the Edit menu select Preferences and in the dialog box click on Advanced; look for ‘Enable style sheets’ and deselect (remove the tickmark from the checkbox); finally click OK and Reload the page.

Browser useage

The following table graphically shows the browsers used by the last 15,782 visitors to this site together with numerical and percentage values. Explorer continues to consolidate its lead.

Browser
MSIE 5	40.09%	6349
MSIE 4	28.30%	4482
Netscape 4	8.27%	1309
Netscape 4.5	5.08%	804
Netscape 4.7	4.72%	747
Netscape 3	4.65%	736
Netscape 4.6	4.14%	656
MSIE 3	2.77%	439
MSIE 2	0.99%	156
Other	0.38%	60
Netscape 2	0.27%	43
Opera 3	0.01%	1

Netscape 6 – first impressions

At last Netscape 6 has made its first appearance on my computer magazine coverdisk and was immediately installed (20th January 2001) in anticipation of real improvements. Have these hopes been realised?

First impressions of its sleek new look were very favourable and there is a discernable improvement in the rendering and readability of type. Justification is handled better and no longer is the last line of a paragraph sometimes stretched beyond reason to fit the predetermined page width. However, superscript and subscript characters are still the same size as normal characters rather than being reduced to about 66% as they should be.

There have always been differences in the way Netscape and MS Explorer interpret HTML tags which necessitate workarounds and cludges and some instances are already apparent. Indeed this Netscape is different to the last, and already I see that this one is inserting extra linespacing in some circumstances.

What about printing? Well, hallelujah!, that problem seems to have been sorted whether it was general or largely confined to HP printers.

Initial enthusiasm for the new look is tempered by the fact that the default ‘skin’ or ‘theme’ is not colour neutral and could clash badly with some websites. Other themes may be even more unforgiving, and certainly some websites will look very crude by comparison; whichever theme is chosen.

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