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I thought I'd post this because I hadn't seen anyone else mention this site. The best HTML / CSS reference I've found is at blooberry.com.

HTML: http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/index.html
CSS: http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/css/propindex/all.htm

For C, C++, perl, and make, the man (and info) pages are usually the quickest and easiest for me. The C man pages are pretty standard. The C++ pages I get from the Sun compiler. They're decent, but not great. They at least say what's available on each class. The perl pages are the same as what's online, but are often a little easier to get to through man (at least for me, especially if I don't have access to the Internet). The 'make' info page pretty much has everything I could want to know about that insanely convoluted (but interesting) language.

I thought I'd post this because I hadn't seen anyone else mention this site. The best HTML / CSS reference I've found is at blooberry.com.

HTML: http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/index.html
CSS: http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/css/propindex/all.htm

For C, C++, perl, and make, the man (and info) pages are usually the quickest and easiest for me. The C man pages are pretty standard. The C++ pages I get from the Sun compiler. They're decent, but not great. They at least say what's available on each class. The perl pages are the same as what's online, but are often a little easier to get to through man (at least for me, especially if I don't have access to the Internet). The 'make' info page pretty much has everything I could want to know about that insanely convoluted (but interesting) language.

That's odd. Slashdot seems to have an issue with non ascii URLs in Plain Old Text mode e.g

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel's_incompl eteness_theorems">test</a>

gives

test

i.e. it's broken because the ö gets removed.

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%F6del's_incom pleteness_theorems">test2</a>

test2

is ok (I URL encoded it here

How did you get it to work?

Huh?

Um, I would like to see your reference material; yes, IE was an offshoot of Mosaic, but it's been established that IE came from Spyglass. MS was to give a percentage of the revenue of sales of IE back to Spyglass, and that they screwed Spyglass over by charging nothing for the use of IE, resulting in as little money as possible going back to the original developers. Spyglass of course, tanked.

Please, try to take the 4 minutes it took me to search, vet, and link material for your claims - it'll help everyone out, including you.

You should care very much what the browser does with invalid code. If a browser implements CSS2, anything new in CSS3 is going to be interpreted as invalid. Similarly, since each browser implements a different subset of the standards, you want to know exactly what will happen if you feed code that works in browser A to browser B. You don't want browser B to look at your @media print rule and decide to apply it to the screen anyway. IE4 actually did this if you put more than one rule in an @media section that it didn't recognize.

if a page is invalid, you shouldn't rely on standards compliant browsers to make things right. Fix the damn page.

That's actually what Acid2 is trying to check: according to the standards, the browser is not supposed to try to compensate for bad code, it's supposed to ignore anything that's broken. If the browser tries to "make things right," it will fail Acid2. If it ignores it, as it's supposed to, it passes.

All that said, as Bogtha pointed out repeatedly, Acid2 tests a lot more than just how the browser handles invalid code.

Opera have supported replaced content for a few years.

You're right, it used to be called -replace and -o-replace. Thanks for the pointer.

Btw, supporting it leads to stupid bugs

I have to disagree there. I don't know what the web designer was thinking, but he was adding generated content to an <i> element and expecting it not to be rendered because CSS 2 limits generated content to the :before and :after pseudo-elements. Of course, CSS 3 doesn't have this limitation, so the content is rendered by CSS 3 user-agents.

So basically, the designer added generated content, expected it to be ignored, and then complained when it wasn't ignored. The bug is the web designer's, not Konqueror's. He should have just not added the generated content in the first place if he didn't want it. Is this a CSS hack? It seems like an awfully fragile one compared with the more usual hacks.

As can be seen in this reference, none of those great CSS2 properties are supported by IE. As much as I would love to use them, they simply do not work for the 50%+ of one's audience that uses IE.

Hence, we are STILL stuck with table-based layouts as they are often the only thing that can reliably stretch to fit arbitrary content in a pleasent way. Sure divs and CSS1 work well for a lot of content where you know the sizes-of-components/lengths-of-text, but for building generic CMSs in which users can add arbitrary ammounts of content, often tables are the only (IE-supported0 option.

The day an IE that supports CSS2 comes out (or IE market share drops to <25%) is the day I remove table layouts. I wish I could do it sooner, but I can't. That said, I can still make sites that validate against XHTML Strict && CSS1/2, I just have to use tables for layout.

- Adam

:-)
Actually, I wouldnt call Netscape as the "fist prophet"
I'd say Mosaic was it.

(though technically there were some even before that, but at least if I recall correctly, it was the first to introduce images in the pages)

History of browsers:
http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/history/browsers .htm
http://www.livinginternet.com/w/wi_browse.htm

Actually, that would be 1994.

"Why is it so popular?"

Because back when it still mattered, and the browser market was up for grabs, Netscape was a festering pile of shit.

And because IE and Netscape were the only existing browsers, right?

> You can detect opera on the server just fine

Oh? Perhaps you can tell me what happens when you set an entry in ua.ini to 4 or 5?
http://www.scss.com.au/family/andrew/opera/browser ids

> And no, you don't need to test for browser or version ever, for any reason, period.

So I guess I shouldn't care that earlier versions of Opera don't support certain CSS parsing behavior
http://centricle.com/ref/css/filters/?whitebg

And I shouldn't care what improvements happen between versions of the same browser in case someone is using an older one
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/selector_attribute.h tml

And I shouldn't care when Firefox implements CSS3 and eventually deprecates/drops the -moz equivalents like -moz-box-sizing
http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/css/properties/e xtensions/nsextensions.htm

Just because you don't think knowing the browser version is important doesn't mean that everyone thinks the way you do. Plenty of people care enough about it enough that there are plenty of client side version detectors out there
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/sniffer/ browser_type.html

Perhaps, before calling us all idiots, you may want to offer an alternate solution that works.

> test "does this feature I want to use work"

It would be nice if I could do this, but the unfortunate reality is that CSS does not work this way.

Unfortunately, CSS capabilities are not testable from script in any browser. You can only rely on the browser version to determine what is or is not available. Getting it wrong might result in a minor cosmetic problem or a browser crash, or maybe a hang. It is cleaner instead to base CSS on the browser version.

This is a problem, yes. And it was made worse by not being able to rely on the user agent string.

CSS hacks were the result. eg.
http://www.albin.net/CSS/OwenHack.html

But CSS hacks are an ugly workaround and don't solve all your problems.
http://digital-web.com/articles/keep_css_simple/

The CSS hack approach seriously lacks elegance.
I believe that version detection is far more elegant by comparison
(providing you get the detailed version info - IE needs to report the service pack level).

Unfortunately, since the cat is already out of the bag (all the existing opera browser instances), relying on the user agent string will never truly be an airtight solution.

Perhaps instead, it would be easier and better to restore elegance to CSS. We just need to convince all the browser manufacturers to make the browser version truly testable in the CSS @media descriptor. Or maybe propose an @version descriptor.

Index dot CSS
Index dot HTML

Just the facts for me...

Index dot CSS
Index dot HTML

Just the facts for me...

No, it's four - at least accord to that site anyway.

I think alot of people have their browser history and timelines wrong. Remember back shall we? Differences between I.E. 5 with Netscape 4 isn't the reason MS took control of the browser market. Netscape 4 was released several months prior to IE 4. The critical knockout blow came when IE 4 was released with a similar feature set and was bundled as the default browser at no additional cost other than buying Windows. Netscape (a much smaller company) was hit hard financially such that they never could release another paid version. 4.5 was essentially a bunch of security fixes etc for the 4.x line. I beleive Netscape also eventually realized they couldnt charge for their browser so released it for free, with hopes to make money with their server products. Of course we all know who succeeded in that arena. The company was becoming desperate and fishing for ideas (to save themselves) with some far reaching plans such as the "all java" browser. I also heard rumor that Netscape wanted to integrate as a shell into the OS as well but ran into problems with using MS proprietary APIs. All other versions 6.x - 7.x where basically rewrites after Netscape open sourced their code. You might also add that MS put the screws to OEMs in an effort to push IE out there. Check this website for a timeline so we can jar some memory banks. Any thoughts or facts are welcome as life was so good back in the '90s - http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/history/browsers .htm

IE 1.0...you're right. The code forked pretty quickly after that. See:
http://www.free-scripts.net/html_tutorial/history/ ie.htm

(Also, here's an old browser timeline:
http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/history/browsers .htm)

Pretty sure that IE 2.0 came bundled with Win95, man.

Yep. Confirmed here.

Win '95 was released November-ish 1995. By the time I had a copy, downloading Netscape 2.0 was the first thing someone with internet access did. Then the 3.0s came out, and Netscape was still slightly better at that point. (And then habit kept me using Netscape 4.whatever almost until Mozilla was usable.)

Maybe you meant IE 4 was bundled with the original Win '98, though.

Reference:

• CSS Property Index by Brian Wilson

Tutorial:

• Adding a touch of style by Dave Raggett

ButtonFace - surface of 3d widgets
GrayText - disabled text colour
InfoBackground - tooltip background colour

There is no question that it was more functional and stable than IE4.

I would question that assertion.

As for functionality, IE4 introduced the modern DOM and added the native COM integration.

IE4 was definitely more stable than Navigator 4. Whatever problems you had with IE4, I'm sure you're talking about the Platform Preview releases. Navigator 4 crashes are what drove me to IE, and I've never looked back.

Remember Netscape layers? Me neither. The IE4 CSS and DOM support made them virtually obsolete.

Netscape may have survived if they had released Navigator 5 instead of stubbornly waiting for the gecko engine to be completed. They allowed MS to take the market with its superior browser. MS would not have even needed to release IE5 (which was mostly CSS2 and better international support.)

Checked it in 7.23 and 7.5. It had problems in version 6. Given that the CTO of Opera Software invented CSS during his previous job at W3C it is also eminently possible that ESPN is not valid HTML/CSS. Opera been making more efforts with non-compliant pages recently and even support *both* the aberrations that are BLINK and MARQUEE.

Again. Maybe you should learn how to use google. Mosaic didn't stop until around IE 4.

And while IE is an off-shoot of early Mosaic, just as Netscape was, Mosaic continued to improve, for several years. By the time the project had concluded, it was the superior product in many respects.

And in fact it wasn't until IE 4, which was released something like 6 months after development of Mosaic ended, that Microsoft's entrant was considered to have arrived.

Call it competing forks if you like. The fact that they were, for a long time, competators is irrefutable.

I'd be more careful about the stones I throw were I in your position.

Index DOT HTML

Index DOT CSS

And the Complete Idiots Guide to HTML 4. All three of those resources helped me a great deal, plus looking at other sites source code to see how they were made. Some of WMs articles were OK, but it wasn't exactly overly helpful to me.

Index DOT HTML

Index DOT CSS

And the Complete Idiots Guide to HTML 4. All three of those resources helped me a great deal, plus looking at other sites source code to see how they were made. Some of WMs articles were OK, but it wasn't exactly overly helpful to me.

Now they just need to fix their CSS support which disgaceful and is giving web-designers headaches all around the world. Looking at the specs you can see how easy life would be if IE supported even half a dozen more css properties and fixed a few bugs. It almost makes CSS useless. No browser has got it perfect, but IE takes the piss, sometimes they dont even bother supporting something in their own way let alone to W3C specs!

Ok, I'll buy that they sued in time. But my other argument on Microsoft's stupid lawyers still holds water. IE has had plugin support since at least Aug 1996 (history) in IE 3.0 I'm sure they have code dating way before that.
How could the lawyers lose this case! It seems so obvious to me.

"And, as a fallback plan, they make products people want."

No, They don't. They buy them and resell them, abusing their large amounts of money to do whatever they please.
Microsoft Internet Explorer? Try spyglass (Part of MOSAIC).
MS-DOS? Seattle computer
many many more examples here (including hotmail, webtv, many others.)

Even their best selling game, Halo, was originaly advertised as a macintosh exclusive. I wonder what changed their mind..

...that this patent is legal, or infact actually even exists. For one thing. it's like saying a large corporation who didn't develop photography technology patents the B&W photograph after people have been taking photos for 100 years with cameras the company doesn't even produce (and then charging the amateur photographer a fee for every picture he takes!). The article states:

SBC Communication's claim of ownership for a common Web site formatting tool is based on a pair of patents, U.S. Patent No. 5,933,841, having a grant date of August 1999, and U.S. Patent No. 6,442,574, which issued three years later in 2002. Both patents cover a "structured document browser" having an invention date at least as early as May 1996, which is the filing date for both the original application that matured into the '841 patent and the continuation application that resulted in the '574 patent.

but Netscape had this technology implemented in 1995, found here:

2.0B1 Oct. 1995 First Beta of the Navigator release added several HTML 3 elements, Frames and the ability to handle Java.

I'm not up on my copyright law, but this has to make one question validity. I can't imagine it holding up in court...

Yeah. This page even says Netscape 2 Beta1 had frames back in 1995. What are they gonna do now ?

The Mozilla browser showed us something else.

More than anything else, Mozilla's well thought architecture managed to build a WORA platform with a strategy different from Java's -- with better quality for desktop apps, I dare say.

One of my favorites, though it hasn't been updated to include Mozilla yet, is here. Index dot HTML and Index dot CSS.

Mosaic was the name of the first web browser, which source code was open, and which source code has been used by Netscape to create their first commercial (but yet available to download for free) close-source browser. Check it here and here and here and here.

That was my first web browser to use. It worked fine on both X11 and Win 3.1, a bit slow, like Mozilla on modern computers. By the way, it has some graphics before Netscape.

Mosaic was the name of the first web browser, which source code was open, and which source code has been used by Netscape to create their first commercial (but yet available to download for free) close-source browser. Check it here and here and here and here.

That was my first web browser to use. It worked fine on both X11 and Win 3.1, a bit slow, like Mozilla on modern computers. By the way, it has some graphics before Netscape.

Apache is a (sic) "IIS Killer"

I think you have it backwards. IIRC, httpd was originally written by NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana, on some flavor or another of BSD or SYSV Unix (BSD, if I remember right...), and is older than NT3.1, at least for purposes of availability. Apache is the end result of a bunch of server admins patching the NCSA sources after NCSA quit supporting httpd (A Patchy Web Server).

The concept of the GUI (and the mouse, for that matter) date back to Xerox PARC in 1975. Incidentally, that was the same time MSwas founded. IIRC, they were selling a BASIC interpreter for some architecture or another of Intel 8008 or 8080 (anybody know the answer to that one?), probably for PL/1, out of Albuquerque, NM. Apple released the first real GUI desktop machine with the LISA in 1983. Windows 1.0 was released around '85 or '86 (the "look-and-feel" suit of Apple vs. MS was basically tossed out because Apple's UI was too close to the PARC Star UI).

As far as invention and innovation go, look to Universities and pure R&D shops. Don't look to Microsoft, unless you want accounting and marketing innovation. DOS has a rather interesting history, as does IE, at least as far as the licensing deals go.

"Do you want to live in a world where things like the GUI, 3D graphics, wordprocessing, webserving, and other commercial products were never developed?"

Most, if not all, of these technologies, originated either on pure proprietary platforms, long since extinct, or on some flavor or another of unix. Word processing in its most raw form has existed since computing cycles became cheap enough for it to be practical. 3D really took off with SGI IRIX and SGI GL, and moreso with OpenGL. In all fairness, MS did join the OpenGL steering council, but they needed to find a way to get around the limitations of the Windows GDI under NT 3.1 so that they could go after the CAD/engineering market.

I will credit you with your point about the arrogance, and to a lesser degree, the "chasing taillights" syndrome. Many people will not try something presented to them with the "[insert commercial product here] Killer" as the main advertising point.

Here's a decent reference that I've been using lately. Not sure how often it's updated but it's not bad. The link I'm giving is for the syntax, but click on the other navigation at the top to check out other CSS support.

Mozilla isn't listed, but we can assume that Netscape == Mozilla .9x

Article Central - a collection of articles related to web development from all over the web. Updated sometimes every day, some times only every other day but always updated. They cover everything from Java to PHP to Macromedia products. Really a must if you are a web developer.

Devshed - I think someone already posted this link, but it's a really good source of tutorials and real world applications.

Freshmeat - Whenever someone tells me that they need a certain functionality, I look here first to save me some time.

Index.html and Index.css at Blooberry.com - no doubt the BEST HTML and CSS references available on the web. Tells you what elements and tags are supported by every browser out there, what version of the browser supports them, and any strange behavior that the browsers might exhibit related to that tag or element.

IBM Alphaworks - Lots of cutting edge software.

It took 5 times as long to get to version 1.0 than MS did with IE.

The Mozilla team started from scratch and produced a working web browser in three years, after deciding that the Netscape 5.0 code on which they had been working for the last year just wouldn't cut it. The Microsoft Internet Explorer team bought the Mosaic browser (a project presumably begun in 1992) and released IE 1.0 in August 1995, and it wasn't actually usable until 3.0 in August 1996. Again four years.

No, but there is something illegal about doing that and giving the result away if you're a monopoly.

You still don't get it; read the stories again. The laws are different for monopolies! Just because it would be legal for a non-monopoly doesn't necessarily mean it would be legal for a monopoly.

And in this case, Microsoft engaged in predatory pricing (giving the browser away). Whatever you might remember, Netscape was still charging for it's browser when Microsoft released IE for free (here's the only link I can find on short notice), so the fact that Microsoft spent all of this money and then gave the browser away made it illegal, no matter who did it. It's called predatory pricing, and Microsoft didn't invent it, they just brought it to the software world (although I'm sure others have done it there, too).

Please, if you're going to comment on whether Microsoft has broken the law, read the antitrust findings and find out exactly which laws Microsoft was convicted of breaking. Yes, convicted, not charged. They lost the antitrust suit, it was only the remedy that was sent back to the lower courts.

Learn the laws, and then make an informed post.

Look here.

Netscape used key NCSA Mosaic developers, and started their code from scratch.

Internet Explorer 1.0 was based on Spyglass Mosaic code, which was the NCSA's commercial distribution of Mosaic. Later versions of IE were, of course, based on IE1.

There's an excellent site devoted to the history of key browsers (though it's missing Konqueror and Lynx) at http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/history/browsers .htm
.


----

Does anyone know of a place (on the web etc) where you can get a compact list of most of the common core of tags support by both the HTML standard and most browsers (ie. both IE and NS)as well as a list of unsupported browser specific tags.

NCD's tag/browser guide (good up to 4/5 of NS/IE), with the results of Robin's HTML 4 Conformance Tests, and Ian Hickson's Evil Test Suite for more outré browsers.

For more detail on usage/display, I recommend Webreference.com's report on html4/extensions in the 4.x browsers and Index Dot Html (big two, plus Mosaic/Opera). Hope this helps.

From the "Index Dot HTML" writeup on TEXTAREA..

Internet Explorer 5.0 briefly supported an element in its beta 2 release called HTMLAREA. This element was very much like TEXTAREA, but it allowed rich HTML markup to be included and manipulated in the editing control area. This content, along with its rich markup, would be passed to the form's processing script. Support for this element was retracted in the final version of Internet Explorer 5.0.

I wonder why they got rid of it, although your idea seems to make better sense anyway.

Cost breakdown here, on the question of how can CD "clubs" sell for a low price: CD Club FAQ: Ethical Issues. It does not, however, get down as far as exactly how much the artist gets, or how big a cut goes to producers, the label execs. But interesting as much as it does analyze.