Re: Netscape 4.0 press release at their server

>   It's an interesting situation. When Netscape first came out they were
>leaders and pushed the web forward. We saw page after page with "This
>page best viewed with Netscape" plastered on them. Now, however, it seems
>that Netscape is holding back progress. How many web developers of large
>sites are not able to start using CSS because they know that most of the
>people coming to their site are using Netscape. And CSS is not the only
>thing. I'd love to start using the OBJECT tag, and I'd really like to be
>able to replace all of my GIF files with PNG files. But I can do neither
>because I know that most of the people who come to my site are using
>Netscrape. So what are we to do? Are we to now start putting "This page
>designed for MS Internet Explorer" on our pages? (I've seen this, BTW). I
>don't know, but I wish there were some way we could force Netscape to
>work with us instead of blatantly working against us.


"This page best viewed with" is an ironic step backwards in document
interchangeability.  Before The Web, that information was given out using
only 4 bytes of data, not 30 or 40.  And it appeared in the document's
meta-information -- the filename -- not in the body of the document itself,
so it was usually easier to get to.  ".DOC" was (and still is) quite a
convenient way to say "This page best viewed with Microsoft Word."

mag

--
.---o  Tom Magliery, Research Programmer                         .---o
`-O-.  NCSA, 605 E. Springfield                  (217) 333-3198  `-O-.
o---'  Champaign, IL 61820          O-        mag@ncsa.uiuc.edu  o---'

Received on Wednesday, 16 October 1996 15:50:39 UTC