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Oh, and you can get NCSA Mosaic 3.0 here, to see how it worked.

Actually, evolt wasn't started by webmonkey employees, but by members of the monkeyjunkies mailing list which webmonkey sponsored.. Read the history of that stuff at evolt

a web browser for MS-Windows and Mac OSX

Don't forget, they used to do it for Solaris too!

A friend of mine downloaded and used it; after approx. 2 minutes, it produced the biggest core dump he'd ever seen. If you're keen, you can get it here.

What are you aiming for - compliance with the W3C specifications, or separation of content and presentation?

You can use all those nasty <font> elements and still adhere to the specifications. Use HTML 4.01 Transitional or XHTML 1.0 Transitional (following Appendix C).

The benefits of adherance to public standards means increased compatibility with present and future browsers, and reduced business risk.

Separation of content and presentation is slightly more risky, due to buggy browsers, particularly Internet Explorer. If you are going to do this, make sure you have somebody familiar with CSS first that knows the limitations of the various browsers.

You may want to do it in two stages - first separating out the minor styling, such as fonts and colours, and then getting rid of the table layouts when you've laid the groundwork.

Older browsers like Netscape 4.x will almost certainly cause you major problems. The normal technique these days is to hide stylesheets from them using their bugs against them. That way, they get the plain, unstyled HTML page (which should still be functional if you are doing things right).

Newer browsers have something called "doctype switching". Make sure you trigger standards-compliant mode so that they are at least trying to do the right thing.

Don't rush headlong into CSS if you've not spent much time with it before. There are plenty of things you can do to screw up a page (e.g. pt or px-sized fonts) that aren't immediately obvious to the newcomer.

Luckily, the things I'm working on are fairly new, so we'd need a pretty strong reason not to use the relevent specifications and separate content from presentation.

A really good troll makes every word in his sentence a link so that his point seems valid.

You don't even have to visit the sites, just google something like "linux vs windows", grab relevent links and include then in your post. No one will read them anyways, and believe you because you provided plenty of background Info and reputable sources (computing.net included!). They will have to believe your Pro-Windows rant.

Linux isn't a Toy OS. it's used by google. Who provided you this Informative post :)

Here you are

Looking for older versions of IE for your older machines? Check out evolt's archive of old broswers. They even have 16-bit versions of Netscape and IE.

How does one go about getting OLD versions of browsers to check their sites with?

All the old browsers you'll ever need can be found at http://browsers.evolt.org/.

With IE, can you install mult. versions on the same machine?

On a Mac, yes. On Windows, no. That, combined with IE's frequent security updates, means I never test my sites on anything but the most current version of IE available. The alternative, leaving IE unpatched, doesn't really appeal, even though I don't normally use it for day-to-day stuff.

Every damned meta-version, they decide to obsolete a few dozen heavily-used tags, replacing them with new tags that do precisely the same thing.

Care to give an example?

Their documentation is horribly written. It's a twisted morass of insanity.

Agreed.

And, of course, they have no power. So, why, pray tell, should we listen to them?

For interoperability purposes.

Yeah, thanks, but no thanks. I'll continue writing pages that look good in as many browsers as possible, and damned be the W3C.

Looking good and complying with W3C recommendations are not mutually exclusive.

Whose specs? Theirs? Why?

For interoperability.

Their clients (who do pay them) don't care about w3.org

They care when their website breaks. They care when they find out they are breaking the law (accessibility is legally required for many people).

I attemped to code to existing CSS "standards" 2 years ago only to discover that the browser interpretation of those "standards" was so unpredictable as to make the attempt pointless.

Times change. Netscape 4.x and Internet Explorer 4.x are close to being dead, which eliminates a hell of a lot of problems.

that's not what Microsoft announced a while back. this article talks about it a bit.

The new Mozilla marketing push reminds me of the TurboGrafx-16 and Nintendo 64 days. "We've got the better browser. And that's what really matters," says a member of the Mozilla Foundation team challenging Internet Explorer's overwhelming dominance in the browser market. Well, the TurboGrafx 16 was technically superior to the Sega Genesis, as was the Nintendo 64 to the Sony Playstation. Guess which game systems won the market share race? The inferior ones. (Beta vs. VHS, anyone?) Guess which systems I bought? The superior ones. Guess how many of my friends I could share games with? Zero, because they had Sega and Sony.

Jeff Howden at evolt.org has a realistic view of what's likely to happen to Mozilla:

"Mozilla won't win with the general public by having a superior feature set. It won't win by rendering faster or being more standards-compliant. Heck, IE didn't do any of those things to get where it is today. It's on top because it's on every desktop."

Too true. It's on mine too, but I use Mozilla. Unfortunately, me plus 1.2 percent of Web users does not a viable market make.

It could happen. As Peter-Paul Koch theorized in this article (slashdot thread).
MS may lose ground in the browser market because they have frozen IE at version 6 SP1. The next version, 7 will only be available on the next Windows OS. With that a few years away, then the adoption of the new OS and browser taking another few years, the other browsers out there, Mozilla and Opera mainly, will make gains in the market because of standards, constant updates and new features being added, support for new technologies that may emerge in the next few years, etc.
In other words, IE will become the rabbit, taking a siesta under a tree while a bunch of turtles slowly creep by.

You can't simply dismiss the possibility with a wave of the hand.

- keith

Funny how this announcement comes a day after this story. It's interesting how Mozilla 1.4 is getting all these rave reviews, and Firebird is going to kick butt. Meanwhile IE innovation has ground to a halt. If these guys start seriously marketing Mozilla and focusing on users, interesting things might happen.

Hence the author speaks directly to fellow web developers, discussing how best to evangelize for web standards without sounding like a nutcase.

• It takes a month to sign off the site's Terms & Conditions because every time any one of your organisation's lawyers changes a full stop, all the other ones need to sign it off.
  
• You realise that your site's visual design isn't working, but it will take a month to wrap a new design around the same words.
  
• Your web design agency insists on all content being signed off two months before it goes live... and then transcribes it incorrectly.
  In a parting gesture, the Web publisher you fired replaced photos of board members with sheep.
  
• You can't update one section of the site because another section has a major overhaul underway. You can either publish the entire site, with both complete and incomplete updates, or hold until both are completed.
  
• You have to work through the night to publish the company's results at market opening time because you don't have a secure area to develop them in advance.
  
• You send email promotions about 'upgrading' to Windows2000 to registered Mac users.
  
• You're employing an army of skilled web publishers just to update the system requirements of your software.
  

The Ghost!

Visiting The Ghost

I code in HTML 2. I never use anything more complicated than nested tables or framesets.

Bzzt. I smell a liar. HTML 2 doesn't include tables or frames. If you are using them, you aren't authoring HTML 2.

I view my pages in lynx, netscape 2

Netscape 2 didn't support the host header in HTTP - the majority of websites require this to function. If you test in Netscape 2, you are wasting your time. Netscape 2 is essentially dead. For everyone.

I really can't see the point of validation.

Then you simply don't know what you are talking about. For example.

My sites don't validate but I've never seen a problem.

Who cares about what you see? It's what your visitors see that matters, and you have no idea what your next important visitor could be using.

To me, standards compliant (x|d)html looks like a tempest in a teapot.

To me, you look like an ignoramus spouting off about something he knows nothing about.

Code in html 2 or 3, every browser will render it.

... a perfect example - HTML 3 existed in draft form only - it was never published.

...they got bought out, went open source.... a positive outcome! Perhaps when Opera goes under something good will come from it too!

I never really liked Mosaic. Cello was better.

evolt.org's success has brought about costs which our volunteers are unable to meet without your help. None of the volunteers are paid for their work - all money is put to use in providing evolt.org's services. Please support evolt.org.

Here I go replying to my own post. What a dork ;)

Anyway, if you want to try some of these tricks, you can get an old version of netscape from http://browsers.evolt.org/index.cfm/dir/navigator/ .

sigh .. You ask Microsoft and they'll say yes. Meanwhile in the real world, no they don't.

It can handle gif-like transparency (single colour transparency) normally. But to support 8 bit alpha level transparency, you have to use a script to 'make it' do it. Here's some example links:

Discussion and howto from evolt.org

WebFX's script

Petition to Make IE support PNG properly (as if MS would ever listen .. grumble

Got a response? TalkBack!

how difficult is it to create websites with text to speech software in mind?
No, not at all. This is the point of seperating the content from presentation. Doing so allows a user-agent to do its job. When Joe was going on about empty alt attributes, he's refering to text-to-speech browsers.

Creating accessible sites is really not that difficult, despite what many here are moaning about. Check out some of these links:

happycog
evolt.org
css-discuss

Because he didn't use &quot;? He used ISO-Latin-1 encoding and Entities &#8220; and &#8221; -- what are you using that doesn't display this? I'd say the tool is broken, not the markup. The only thing he could have done better was use the character entity names -- &ldquo; and &rdquo;.

Speaking of database calls, why is there zero abstraction in PHP? why do I have to find and replace every function call to change databases.

Have you heard of Pear DB?

What is PEAR?

Good Luck.

Here's another review at Evolt.
Which is also featured here. They've been Pirated.

Opera had a MDI interface well before version 4.

Lets compare the functionality of the 'Window Bar' and the 'Tabbed Browsing'. The window bar is a row of buttons labeled with the title of each open page. When clicked they bring that page to the foreground of the MDI interface. The Mozilla tabs are a row of buttons (they respond to a mouse click) with rounded corners and shading to make them look like a folder tab. They carry the page title and when clicked bring the document to the foreground. Functionally identical.

Now, for the version numbers you are so sure about. Run Windows or X86 Linux? Go to evolt's browser archive and download some old versions of their browser and turn on the window bar.

Now I've finally figured out why all of you think that Opera introduced this in version 6. With version 6, Opera works in SDI mode. Now I'll admit they copied other browser in this, the first version of Netscape I downloaded worked in SDI mode. And, like Mozilla, Opera allows a hybrid of SDI and MDI modes within each SDI interface with a page bar (sound familiar? a row of buttons that allows you to choose the foreground web page?). However, you can't say that Opera copied Mozilla with this feature, people have been complaining about Opera's MDI mode for as long as they've had that feature.

I am glad Mozilla has adopted the tabs, there are a few other Opera features that would be well appreciated in Mozilla as well (remembering open windows, gestures, whole page magnification to name the most obvious ones), at least some of these are in the works at mozdev.org. And proper DOM support would go a long ways toward making Opera the ultimate browser.

Oh, and even though this is buried in the thread, that article had one glaring mistake, the Opera download includes the JRE 1.3, not 1.1. Big difference, Java has come quite a ways since 1.1 and it is useful that they have a relatively modern JRE included in the download.

Yep, the two browsers are very much different between platforms. It's an incredible pain actually debugging DHTML scripts between the two, especially if you consider IE4/Mac which has more bugs than your average ant colony.

IE5 on the Mac runs its own rendering engine called "Tasman". In fact, IE5/Mac was the first commerical browser to introduce full CSS1 compliance, meaning things like first-line or -letter psuedo classes and full support for 'float' etc.

IE5.5 and IE6 on Windows are pretty similar. The big advance on Windows was from IE5->5.5 which included the new CSS filter syntax (for fancy transitions and fades, the "whizz-bang Windows features" that never made the Mac version), more CSS compliance and importantly not having to start a new copy of the rendering engine for every frame. That means you can float divs over IFrames, something that Mozilla can do as well. (Like I said, they like playing catchup :). IE6 doesn't have a lot that's too new underneath the UI, just a few more DOM properties here and there (like 'backCompat' and implementation details), about the only major new feature is the "Media Bar". A supply of bug fixes in the future is the main reason why I upgraded :).

If you're really interested load up the "JS Object Browser" script from my homepage in each of the various browsers to inspect the DOMs.

Hold back the excitment, people, it's another episode of story recycling.

This site is pretty handy, now that I'm on the topic. Also make sure to check out RobotCop. Out for Apache now, coming soon for IIS and Zeus!

Most CMSs actually don't really bother about searching via their internal datastores, mostly because of the problems you've raised above.

What you tend to get are two (not mutually exclusive) approaches:

1. Spidering of content using a packaged solution from vendors such as Verity, Autonomy or Thunderstone
2. Internal datastore searching of taxonomy - metadata about how the content is organised. This is the harder one to crack as an effective taxonomy takes a looooong time to get right for a half-way complex site.

Sidenote - you can get around those query string URLs with most serverside scripting environments (as well as that PHP tutorial, it's worth bearing in mind that evolt's site is built in a similar way using Cold Fusion)

Web site design needs a lot of different things, Information architecture & usability, HTML & XHTML, CSS & implementation bugs, search engine ideas and keyword research, Web server techniques & content management, deeziner discussion & tech discussion, good practices & sucky practices.

I could go on. My point is that you can either be a half-hearted jack-of-all-trades, or do the Web a favour and pick something, learn to understand it and collaborate with people who have complimentary skills.

Of course a Web site is no use if no one visits it. A link from the /. home page is a good start.

Calum

netdiver.net has a good selection of nice website and cutting edge designs. Subscribe to lists like the ones at evolt.org, and read A List Apart and Zeldman. They all preach standards and do great work.

I've just rented a dedicated server running freebsd, and I get messages of relay denied daily, now I need to accept relay for my users... so i've been reading about pop before smpt, thats a good solution, since I am not used to sendmail, it has been very difficult to configure it for me...

I've handled local relaying by just adding IP addresses and/or address blocks to the server config. It works as long as nobody has a dynamic IP address...since the addresses that are let through are all private-subnet addresses (people behind the firewall), this isn't a problem. Their mail gets out, but spammers in search of an open relay are cut off.

You might also want to look into qmail...it's much simpler to get going than sendmail, and IIRC no security holes have been found yet.

Somebody linked to this article on using Apache to find the bots that swipe email addresses from websites. While you're waiting for the bots to respond to their suggested changes, you might also consider searching your logs for other attempts at sending mail through your system. Searching all the logged 404s on my server turned up 91 attempts at exploiting webmail systems. Some were the result of Nessus scans I had aimed at my server, but filtering those out left 36 confirmed attempts.

Here are the user-agents that turned up:

• EmailSiphon
• Microsoft URL Control - 6.00.8862
• Gozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; windows 2000)

• 07-127.057.popsite.net
• 209.85.24.157
• 24-161-169-176.san.rr.com
• 24.27.210.44.pinecastle-ubr-a.cfl.rr.com
• 251.cleveland-05-10rs.oh.dial-access.att.net
• 2cust165.tnt2.ladue.mo.da.uu.net
• 63.116.175.28
• 64-214-40-67.brv.frontiernet.net
• ac85c77d.ipt.aol.com
• ac894f07.ipt.aol.com
• ac8b6f74.ipt.aol.com
• acb5c2f6.ipt.aol.com
• adsl-64-169-101-147.dsl.lsan03.pacbell.net
• adsl-64-172-45-126.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net
• cm092.8.234.24.lvcm.com
• ip68-0-166-201.tc.ph.cox.net
• lsanca1-ar2-143-206.lsanca1.dsl.gtei.net
• pool-151-201-153-163.phil.east.verizon.net
• roc-204-210-146-77.rochester.rr.com
• tide86.microsoft.com

I posted an article that deals with stopping spambots with common apache tools last week in the apache section of slashdot. hopefully some can find use of it here as well :)

here's the link directly to the article as well:
Stopping Spambots II - The Admin Strikes Back

You can still download the original Sprynet (Non-MS) Internet Explorer at the Evolt.org browser archive, here

I recall that MS also had to settle with Synet (not Sprynet) on the name Interner Explorer. The original company went under, but was kept alive long enough by lawyers for some sort of settlement from MS. That story you can read about here, with added info here.

Then, these are the people who insist that "BookShelf" is not a generic term.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

You can still download the original Sprynet (Non-MS) Internet Explorer at the Evolt.org browser archive, here

I recall that MS also had to settle with Synet (not Sprynet) on the name Interner Explorer. The original company went under, but was kept alive long enough by lawyers for some sort of settlement from MS. That story you can read about here, with added info here.

Then, these are the people who insist that "BookShelf" is not a generic term.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

We have an article about "smart tags" at evolt.org that people might be interested in reading - includes a few more links and a screenshot of them in action:

Microsoft implementing 'Smart Tags' in IE release

You are still making assumptions about the browsing experience.

• My screen resolution is 1600x1200 but I never, ever, ever maximixe my browser window. My browser window never gets wider than about 1024 pixels -- Unless a lame site (like heavy.com) decides to maximize it for me.
• I have an intellimouse. If only HTTP headers could tell us who has wheel-mice. See, I don't mind scrolling. I'd rather scroll than have to read a column of text that's 1000 pixels wide. Any day.
• I still run 56K dialup. So given the option of 1024 or 800, I'll choose 800 every time because the overall load time is bound to be shorter.

I hate to make sweeping generalizations, but it seems to me web designers whose roots in web design come from programming understand the concept of user preference. It also seems to me that the designers with their roots in print, or interactive, want to control every little aspect of the user experience. They want to maximize your window (or worse - use 6 frames) and force you to watch the flash intro and absolutely position every pixel on the page.

Sending screen resolution isn't anything new when it comes to HTTP headers. IE for windows has been doing it since 4.0. Netscape does it too, they just subtract the area that windows' taskbar eats up. I find it interesting that Sandbox is sending the viewable browser size too, which is a much more usable statistic. See this link for more info on that..
(http://evolt.org/article/Real_World_Browser_Siz e_ Stats_Part_II/20/2297/) for the timid.

Accessibility: more than the right thing to do

Workforce investment act of 1998

Accessibility: The Clock is Ticking

Getting Started with Usability Testing

Accessibility: more than the right thing to do

Workforce investment act of 1998

Accessibility: The Clock is Ticking

Getting Started with Usability Testing

Accessibility: more than the right thing to do

Workforce investment act of 1998

Accessibility: The Clock is Ticking

Getting Started with Usability Testing

• http://browsers.evolt.org/
• http://cws.internet.com/web.html
• http://www.rwcp.or.jp/people/yk/WWW/browsers.html (Remark: isn't the blink tag annoying?)
• http://www.freebrowsers.com/list.htm Those are all free
• http://browserwatch.internet.com

Now you may not be aware of this, but in many countries, sites must be accessible.

• In the US, the Americans with Disabilities Act means that all federal services (and many state ones) must be accessible.
• In the UK, any site which offers a public service (nb this includes all online stores) must be accessible, thanks to the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act.
• In Australia, the Sydney Olympic Games Organising Committee were successfully sued for being inaccessible to the blind

With this going on, an IE-only web is going to get further away, not closer. The only way to be accessible is to ensure that basic HTML standards-compliant pages will allow users to access the basic functionality of their sites.

More info:

• Accessibility - more than the right thing to do
• Accessibility, the politics of design
• W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative
• Joe Clark (Web Accessibility advocate)'s blog
• UK government's position on web accessibility

Now you may not be aware of this, but in many countries, sites must be accessible.

• In the US, the Americans with Disabilities Act means that all federal services (and many state ones) must be accessible.
• In the UK, any site which offers a public service (nb this includes all online stores) must be accessible, thanks to the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act.
• In Australia, the Sydney Olympic Games Organising Committee were successfully sued for being inaccessible to the blind

With this going on, an IE-only web is going to get further away, not closer. The only way to be accessible is to ensure that basic HTML standards-compliant pages will allow users to access the basic functionality of their sites.

More info:

• Accessibility - more than the right thing to do
• Accessibility, the politics of design
• W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative
• Joe Clark (Web Accessibility advocate)'s blog
• UK government's position on web accessibility

I'm so confused...

-B

That's nuthin.... Check out the Evolt.org Browser Archive. There's pretty much every browser that ever existed there.

I wrote an article for evolt.org on this topic over a year ago (24 August 1999).

A couple of my concerns were regarding their handling of the growing number of dynamic sites on the Internet, and the criteria for inclusion (ie, musician fan sites, and childrens' entertainment groups were included in the database).

My primary suggestion was that the Australian government's money could be better spent on providing subsidised hosting for approved and culturally significant Web projects, instead of merely duplicating (at least in the short term) a lot of content.