vs. 
These and other headlines have screamed at most of us out of magazines and the mouths of technology show hosts, making the the internet sound like a bloody place indeed. The Big Two and their numerous smaller challengers are playing a serious game.
The prize?
Control of a market that no one yet knows the depth of. Bill Gates has seen a future, and in that future, he (or they) who control the browser control the desktop. In fact, the next release of Windows is reported to contain a fully integrated browser that will open files and applications on and off the desktop with equal ease. Gates (and Mark Andressen of Netscape and others) are looking to a future in which computers are always connected to the internet. The only question in their minds is: "Whose browser will be handling that connection?"
Right now, statistics show Netscape as the browser of choice, with as high as 70% of all world-wide web and intranet users running it. However, anyone who knows Bill Gates and Microsoft knows that nothing is impossible when you own the desktop.
What does this have to do with making pages?.
For starters, Netscape has, for the past couple of years, been able to force the adoption of HTML standards by the World Wide Web Consortium. Now Microsoft is going that route, integrating proposed standards like cascading style sheets.
Beyond that, (and finally, the real subject of this article) the browser you choose is your eyes and ears as a web designer. I selected Netscape because it's faster and marginally better supported on a Mac, and also because most of the people who visit the sites I develop are using it too. Beyond the previewing of pages, I use it to:
View Source (or How Did They Do That?)
Up there under your View menu, you'll find the option to "View Source". What that means is that you can look at the HTML code of the page. It's probably the best way to learn how to do something that you see on someone else's page. If you don't change your preferences, the source will appear in a Netscape window. This is fine if you're just looking, but if you want to edit the text of a document, you'll need to hike on over to the Options menu and choose "General Preferences:Applications". This screen will give you the option to use Netscape or Browse for an alternative. If you have an HTML editing program, then you can select that. If not, then WordPad or your simplest text program is a good choice. You can then fool with the HTML (mistakes are often the best teachers), paste a bit into your document and otherwise fiddle to your heart's content.View Document Info (or Let Me See That)
Under the View menu is "View Document Info". It's usage is much like "View Source", except that it lets you open the images and links contained within the document. Handy especially for the viewing of background images as it is almost the only way you can open them if they are not on your hard drive.The Right Click (or So That's Why My Mouse Has Two Buttons)
Clicking and holding down the righthand button of your mouse (if you only have one button, try that one) in more recent versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer will bring up a menu with options that can include:
- Open This Image -- which allows you to view just the image as if
it were a page. By doing this you can see the image size in pixels, file type and name and whether or not it's a .jpg or .gif. By Reloading that image, you can also, if you watch your bottom status bar, see the file size (K).
- Save This Image -- You can save the image to your hard drive for further study and/or alteration (watch out for copyright laws though--it's only a myth that they don't apply to the internet!)
- Copy this image/link location -- Good to do if you want to reference the image or link from your own page. (As in: "Here's a 250K Picture of a Baby Note: Though providing links to images is nearly always fine, be careful about including other people's actual images on your pages. Copyright as well of the tendency of some folks (like myself) to rename files and substitute rather embarrassing images in their place make this an inadvisable practice.
The GIF Fling (or One Thing That Macs Are Good For)
While fooling around with an image in a window of Netscape, I inadvertantly discovered the ability to hurl images out of Netscape. If the land on the desktop, they are saved. Even more astoundingly, if they are "flung" into an open window for another program even one that won't even open .gifs, they'll appear in that document!Bookmarks (or Remember That For Me, Would Ya?)
NOTE: I only refer to Netscape in the above tips because I simply don't use my copy of Internet Explorer often enough to know how to do the same things in it. I would guess that it probably can, but HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO DO THEM AND LESS DESIRE TO LEARN. (That sort of means, "Please, ask Microsoft, not me")
Properly used, your Bookmarks can act as a kind of peripheral memory in which you can keep track of HTML reference sites and pages which you would either like to link to or upon which you found something interesting. Bookmark them, because you can't go back later if you can't find the page. Your bookmark file exists on your hard drive as an HTML document (bookmarks.htm(l) in your browser folder), which you can open and use the source as your Links page.
In the end, the browser is the window through which you view your own work and the work of others. The quality and clarity, as well as the structure, of that window will determine to some extent the quality and clarity of the pages you develop. In my opinion, the "enhanced for Netscape, Microsoft or CyberChicken 2.376 beta" buttons are a little silly -- pages should display on any browser -- there are times when you can use an interesting proprietary tag without detracting too much from the experience of those who aren't using that browser or its latest version.
There is another reason to "enhance" for (and browse with!) the latest browser: the effects are better! I mean, when they put out programs and games, they don't say "Enhanced for Pentium-235"...it's just understood.
