The 'state of the browsers' report

NS and MSIE's 'support' for OBJECT is downright discouraging - not only
have NO improvements in the handling of OBJECT been made since their 3.x
releases, MSIE has arguably *lost* some ground. NS remains blissfully (and
harmlessly) unaware of OBJECT, MSIE has slipped from being unaware of
OBJECT with ActiveX turned off (and hanging the display with it turned on
for as simple a thing as a JPEG image) to actually making enclosed content
*disappear* with ActiveX turned off and producing various errors and user
frightening warnings with ActiveX turned on for a JPEG image. 

Grades for OBJECT support:

Netscape: D
MSIE:     F

External client-side imagemaps have 'improved'. Sort of. NS4.0b4 no longer
breaks the *server* side imagemap when a usemap pointing to an external
map is used. Now NS and MSIE both simply fail to use the external map
at all and fall through to the server side image map. For inlined CLIM,
Netscape doesn't display *either* the ALT text or the URL, MSIE displays
the (partial) URL when the pointer is over the 'hot area'.

Grades for CLIM:

Netscape: C+
MSIE:     B-

Both NS and MSIE have fixed numerous bugs in their initial CSS1
stylesheet support - although both also still have noticable missing
support for core elements of CSS1. Most improved is NS's fixing of their
'lets try to run CSS1 as JSSS' bug. 

Grades for CSS1:

Netscape: B
MSIE:     B


On the other hand, a mere TWO YEARS after PNG was released, complete with
working C source code for the full implementation (including streaming
support), they both now have *partial* implementations of PNG for IMG in
their 4.0bs.

Grades for PNG:

Netscape: C-
MSIE:     C+

-- 
Benjamin Franz

Received on Tuesday, 13 May 1997 18:59:21 UTC