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Netscape vs. Microsoft
And the Great Tag Debate
In the beginning, there was Netscape, and things were good. It was so much better because it covered all the tags approved by the W3 Consortium unlike that ancient Mosaic. But soon, Netscape awoke a slumbering giant, and Microsoft Internet Explorer gained momentum not unlike those giant snowballs in countless cartoons. In the meantime, however, Netscape was gobbling up market share at astounding speeds by offering a twist to developers: new, amazing tags not yet approved by the slow W3. This was all right with users at first, for those tags pumped their pages with flashy new features. But soon Microsoft Internet Explorer had caught up, and webmasters started putting Netscape and MSIE icons on their pages.
But this happiness is all coming to an ugly end very fast. Microsoft Internet Explorer has taken the same strategy as Netscape now: Offer stuff the other guy doesn't have. So, as we can see in the 4.0 beta, MSIE users are being force-fed ActiveDesktop, Dynamic HTML, and Style Sheets, great little doodads for making neat-o pages. But, Netscape isn't going to stand by as its market share vanishes. No, it's currently devising its own new tags and languages. Uh-Oh.
You see, although these new technologies do wonderful things, they only work with one of two browsers that each have about a 50% share of the users. So, if you want to make a kickin' page chock full of Dynamic HTML and ActiveX Controls, you just made your page unaccessible to half your audience. Of course, you could make one page Netscape-compatable and the other work with MSIE, and put them along you low and high bandwidth versions of the page for a great splash page offering loads of options for every end of the scale. Then you have to start updating the content on each of these pages. By the time you have that done, Netscape and Microsoft will have introduced a whole new range of features, and within a month, you're living in a cave in Tibet, sucking your thumb and mumbling, "Too... many... tags..."
So what are you, the designer, going to do about this? Well, ActiveDesktop does some pretty neat things, but your page probably doesn't need it. JavaScript can do most of the things Dynamic HTML does, and runs on more platforms. Style Sheets, well, they're really nice, but stick to tables for the meantime and you'll have it made. Sooner or later, though, Netscape and MSIE will have to come up with some sort of agreement to control this tag wildfire. This will come about the same time as a text size standard, white space controls, Java that doesn't crash your machine, cable modems, in other words, when pigs fly. So you can hope for hoggish improvements in the most committed Darwinian sense, or you can join an interactive petition sponsored by ZDNet to sap some sense into Netscape and Microsoft.
In the meantime, I'll be making all-text pages.
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SiteSource Articles
Web Page Makeovers: The Rules of Web Design
Netscape Vs. Microsoft and the Great Tag Debate
A Real Retro Web Page
Fonts and the Future of Web Design
Simplicity: How Not To Fall Off the Web Page Learning Curve
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